It is difficult for the mind to comprehend the immense quantity of ice which floated upon the sea around me. To enumerate the separate bergs was impossible. I counted five hundred, and gave up in despair. Near by they stood out in all the rugged harshness of their sharp outlines; and from this, softening with the distance, they melted away into the clear gray sky; and there, far off upon the sea of liquid silver, the imagination conjured up effigies both strange and wonderful. Birds and beasts and human forms and architectural designs took shape in the distant masses of blue and white. The dome of St. Peter's loomed above the spire of Old Trinity; and under the shadow of the Pyramids nestled a Byzantine tower and a Grecian temple. To the eastward the sea was dotted with little islets,--dark specks upon a brilliant surface. Icebergs, great and small, crowded through the channels which divided them, until in the far distance they appeared massed together, terminating against a snow-covered plain that sloped upward until it was lost in a dim line of bluish whiteness. This line could be traced behind the serrated coast as far to the north and south as the eye would carry. It was the great _mer de glace_ which covers the length and breadth of the Greenland Continent. The snow-covered slope was a glacier descending therefrom,--the parent stem from which had been discharged, at irregular intervals, many of the icebergs which troubled us so much, and which have supplied materials for this too long description. [Sidenote: TESSUISSAK.] At length a strong breeze came moaning among the bergs, and sent us on our way rejoicing. In the evening; of August 21st we were moored in a little harbor scarcely large enough for the schooner to turn round. We lay abreast of a rocky slope on which were pitched a few seal-skin tents, inhabited by a set of well-to-do-looking Esquimaux. I noticed two or three native huts, overgrown with moss and grass, and one, better looking than the rest, in which Jensen, my interpreter, informed me that he had resided. The place is called Tessuissak, which means "the place where there is a bay." Sonntag went ashore with his sextant and "horizon," to find out its exact position in the world, an event which had not before come to pass in its history, and which I fear was not duly appreciated by its inhabitants. We should have been away in a couple of hours; but Jensen discovered that his team was scattered, and many of the animals could not be found until after much searching. Meanwhile some ice drifted across the mouth of the harbor, and hermetically sealed us up.