In our next day’s march we visited the snow-house built by Petersen in the autumn, and found its roof level with the snow. A fox had taken up his quarters in it, and made very free with the dog biscuit. That night we camped near a conspicuous mass of ice on the shore of a small island. The spot afterwards became a well-known landmark. Partly by accident, and partly because the striking piles of ice made a definite point to march for, the numerous shorter sledge parties often halted there for lunch or camp. Upon one such occasion the drawing reproduced in this book was obtained (Plate No. 12). The floeberg itself was not a very large one, but it afforded an excellent example of the structure of polar floe. We could not but wonder what enormous force had pushed it upwards on the sloping beach till its flat upper surface stood forty feet above the floes around it. The lower half was made of what may be called conglomerate ice, the upper was stratified with the usual white and blue layers—white where the ice was spongy with air-cells, blue in the denser layers between. High overhead might be seen a section, in olive-tinted ice, of what had once been a summer pool, and on top of all, like sugar on a cake, lay last season’s snow, slowly condensing into ice. [Illustration: PLATE XII.—A FLOEBERG, SIMMON’S ISLAND, APRIL, 1876.—p. 59. The great stratified masses of salt ice that lie grounded along the shores of the Polar Sea are nothing more than fragments broken from the edges of the perennial floes. We called them floebergs in order to distinguish them from, and yet express their kinship to, icebergs—the latter and their parent glaciers belong to more southern regions. Partly because it was a conspicuous point to push on for before halting for lunch, the floeberg on Simmon’s Island became a familiar landmark in the many trips of the supporting sledges across Black Cliff Bay; and the chill hour while tea was preparing was often spent in speculating on the enormous force required to push the huge square mass so high on shore.]