The walrus-hunter, unless he keeps to the sea-shore, and the ice-floes within reach of a boat, must be prepared to undergo many hardships, and to confront with a calm heart the most baffling and terrible dangers. He may be overtaken by a gale; and a gale in the wild remote North, far from any shelter,--a gale which drives before it the blinding snow and pitiless icicles,--a gale which sweeps unresisted and irresistible over leagues of frozen snow,--a gale which comes down from the mountain-recesses where the glaciers take their rise,--is something so dread, so ghastly, that the dweller in temperate regions can form no idea of it. We remember that one of the gallant seekers after Franklin describes an Arctic gale, and its effects. He says that the ice, at a short distance from the shore, had in many places been swept bare of snow by the driving blast; and over the glassy sheet he and his companions were helplessly carried along before the gale. The dogs, seldom stretching their traces, ran howling in front of the sledges, which pressed upon their heels. Wild was the scene, and dark. The moon had sunk far behind the snow-shrouded mountains, and the travellers had no other light than the shimmer of stars. The deep shadows of the cliffs, towering a thousand feet above their heads, lay heavily upon them, and enhanced the midnight gloom. The patches of snow clinging to the sharp angles of the colossal wall; the white shroud lying on its lofty summit; the glaciers which here and there protruded through its clefts, brought out into striking relief the blackness of its cavernous recesses. The air was filled with clouds of drift, which sometimes completely hid the land, and swept relentlessly before the explorers, as they tottered across the frozen plain. Suddenly a dark line became visible across their path; its true nature revealed by circling wreaths of “frost-smoke.” “_Emerk! emerk!_” (Water! water!) shouted the drivers, checking as suddenly as possible the headway of the sledges, but not until the party were within a few feet of a recently opened and rapidly widening crack,--a fissure in the ice-crust, already twenty feet across.