The whole of the western coast is mountainous and picturesque, and though it is shone upon by a four months’ sun every year, its snowy covering is never wholly dissolved, nor are its icy monuments of the dominion of frost ever removed. The valleys, opening towards the coast, and terminating in the background with a transverse chain of mountains, are chiefly filled with everlasting ice. The inland valleys, at all seasons, present a smooth and continued bed of snow, in some places divided by considerable rivulets, but in others exhibiting a pure unbroken surface for many leagues in extent. Along the western coast, the mountains take their rise from within a league of the sea, and some from its very edge. Few tracts of table-land, of more than a league in breadth, are to be seen, and in many places the blunt termination of mountain ridges project beyond the regular line of the coast, and overhang the waters of the ocean. The southern part of Spitzbergen consists of groups of insulated mountains, little disposed in chains, or in any determinate order, having conical, pyramidal, or ridged summits, sometimes round-backed, frequently terminating in points, and occasionally in acute peaks, not unlike spires. An arm of a short mountain chain, however, forms the southern cape, or Point Look-out, but a low flat, in the form of a fish’s tail, of about forty square miles in surface, constitutes the termination of the coast. Other promontories, lying nearly north and south, are of a similar nature. To the northward of Charles’s Island the mountains are more dispersed in chains than they are to the southward. The principal ridge lies nearly north and south, and the principal valley extends from the head of Cross Bay to the northern face of the country, a distance of forty or fifty miles. An inferior chain of hills, two or three leagues from the coast, runs parallel with the shore, from which lateral ridges project into the sea, and terminate in mural precipices. Between these lateral ridges, some of the largest icebergs on the coast occur. The most remarkable mountains I have seen are situated near Horn Sound, on Charles’s Island, and near King’s Bay. Horn Mount, or Hedge-hog Mount, so-called from an appearance of spires on the top, when seen in some positions, takes its rise from a small tract of alpine land, on the southern side of Horn Sound. It has different summits, chiefly in the form of spires, one of which is remarkably elevated. I had an opportunity of determining its height in the year 1815. From one set of observations its altitude came out 1,457 yards, and from another 1,473 yards, the mean of which is 1,465 yards, or 4,395 feet. Another peak, a few miles further to the northward, appeared to be 3,306 feet high.