Sure enough, within a week, ice locked round the ship in a vise. The floes were no brashy ice-cakes that could be plowed through by a ship’s prow with a strong, stern wind. They were huge fields of ice, five, ten, twenty and thirty feet deep interspread with hummocks and hillocks that were miniature bergs in themselves. Across these rolling meadows of crystal, the wind blew with the nip of midwinter; but when the sun became partly hidden in fiery cloud-banks, the scene was a fairy land, sea and sky shading off in deepest tinges to all the tints of the rainbow. Where the ocean showed through ice depths, there was a blue reflection deep as indigo. Where the clear water was only a surface pool on top of submerged ice, the sky shone above with a light green delicate as apple bloom. Where the ice was a broken mass of an adjacent glacier sliding down to the sea through the eternal snows of some mountain gorge, a curious phenomenon could sometimes be observed. The edge of the ice was in layers—each layer representing one year’s snowfall congealed by the summer thaw, so that the observer could count back perhaps a century from the ice layers. Other men tread on snow that fell but yesterday. Hudson’s crew were treading on the snowfall of a hundred years as though this were God’s workshop in the making and a hundred years were but as a day. Beyond the floating ice fields, the heights of Nova Zembla were sighted, awesome and lonely in the white night, gruesome to these men from memory of the fate that befell the Dutch crews here fifteen years previously. Rowing and punting through the ice-brash, two men went ashore to explore. They saw abundance of game for the Muscovy gentlemen; and at one place among driftwood came on the cold ashes of an old fire. It was like the first print of man’s footstep found by Robinson Crusoe. Startled by signs of human presence, they scanned the surrounding landscape. On the shore, a solitary cross had been erected of driftwood. Then the men recalled the fate of the Dutch crew, that had perished wandering over these islands in 1597. What fearful battles had the white silences witnessed between puny men explorers and the stony Goddess of Death? What had become of the last man, of the man who had erected the cross? Did his body lie somewhere along the shores of Nova Zembla, or had he manned his little craft like the Vikings of old and sailed out lashed to the spars to meet death in tempest? The horror of the North seemed to touch the men as with the hands of the dead whom she had slain. [Illustration: HUDSON’S VOYAGES of 1607-1608 To Pass across the Pole from EUROPE to ASIA.]