The coast of Greenland, like other western shores, is so subdivided by inlets and fiords, that there are but few places where it is possible to get a good view over any extent of the _mar de glace_. Three or four miles off, as we saw it, its surface seems smooth enough, but it is really so uneven and fissured, that the most persevering attempts to travel inland over it have penetrated but a short distance, after three days’ incessant toil. When not checked by labyrinths of crevasses, the travellers have encountered impassable rivers, flowing in icy beds, till they plunged in a cloud of mist into fathomless pits. Enough, however, has been learned to justify the belief, that a continuous mass of ice, many thousand feet deep, loads the whole of Greenland, from the land’s end near Cape Farewell, to far north beyond Petermann’s fiord, where our Expedition traced its outline behind the coast hills on the shores of the Polar Sea. The place where we stood afforded an excellent site for a sketch; some bold rocks over the cliffs and a mellow-tinted herbage—principally red-tipped three-cleft saxifrage—supplied a good foreground. Our artistic proceedings were, however, interrupted by the appearance of a little grey fox, attracted doubtless by the dead hare. He seemed perfectly aware of the danger he ran, and never exposed more than his forehead, ears, and eyes over the rocks behind which he had taken up his position. His skin would have made an acceptable addition to our collection; and after waiting some time in hope that he would make a further advance, he was fired at, but missed, and he gave us no opportunity for a second shot. [Illustration: PLATE II.—FOULKE FIORD AND THE INLAND ICE OF GREENLAND, JULY 28, 1875.—p. 16. Foulke Fiord is a narrow ice-scooped inlet in the coast of Greenland, at the entrance of Smith’s Sound. Hayes made it his winter quarters; and Rensselaer Bay, where Kane spent his three winters, is close to the northward. On the shore of the fiord, and under the red granite cliff in foreground of the picture, a few ruined huts mark the site of the once populous Eskimo village of Etah—the capital of the “Arctic Highlanders.” At the head of the fiord an expanse of lake and valley leads to Brother John’s Glacier of Kane, stretching down in the shape of a huge paw from the inland ice beyond. This continental ice lies thousands of feet thick over what little is known of the interior of Greenland, and looks like a vast frozen sea, but that its level is sensibly above the horizon.]