The fog clearing up by the time we had become rested, and the land being soon reached, we pursued our way along the ice-foot with much the same fortune as had befallen us since striking the shore above Cape Napoleon. The coast presented the same features--great wall-sided cliffs rising at our left, with a jagged ridge of crushed ice at our right, forming a white fringe, as it were, to the dark rocks. We were, in truth, journeying along a winding gorge or valley, formed by the land on one side and the ice on the other; for this ice-fringe rose about fifty feet above our heads, and, except here and there where a cleft gave us an outlook upon the sea, we were as completely hemmed in as if in a cañon of the Cordilleras. Occasionally, however, a bay broke in upon the continuity of the lofty coast, and as we faced to the westward along its southern margin, a sloping terraced valley opened before us, rising gently from the sea to the base of the mountains, which rose with imposing grandeur. I was never more impressed with the dreariness and desolation of an Arctic landscape. Although my situation on the summit of the Greenland _mer de glace_, in October of the last year, had apparently left nothing unsupplied to the imagination that was needed to fill the picture of boundless sterility, yet here the variety of forms seemed to magnify the impression on the mind, and to give a wider play to the fancy; and as the eye wandered from peak to peak of the mountains as they rose one above the other, and rested upon the dark and frost-degraded cliffs, and followed along the ice-foot, and overlooked the sea, and saw in every object the silent forces of Nature moving on through the gloom of winter and the sparkle of summer, now, as they had moved for countless ages, unobserved but by the eye of God alone, I felt how puny indeed are all men's works and efforts; and when I sought for some token of living thing, some track of wild beast,--a fox, or bear, or reindeer,--which had, elsewhere, always crossed me in my journeyings, and saw nothing but two feeble men and our struggling dogs, it seemed indeed as if the Almighty had frowned upon the hills and seas. Since leaving Cairn Point we had looked most anxiously for bears; but although we had seen many tracks, especially about Cape Frazer, not a single animal had been observed. A bear, indeed, would have been a godsend to us, and would have placed me wholly beyond anxiety respecting the strength of the dogs, as it would not only have put new life into them, but would have given them several days of more substantial rations than the dried beef which they had been so long fed upon. [Sidenote: QUITTING THE LAND-ICE.]