After the melting of the snow there appears besides a number of inequalities, and the clefts previously covered with a fragile snow-bridge now gape before the wanderer where he goes forward, with their bluish-black abysses, bottomless as far as we can depend on ocular evidence. At some places there are also to be found in the ice extensive shallow depressions, down whose sides innumerable rapid streams flow in beds of azure-blue ice, often of such a volume of water as to form actual rivers. They generally debouch in a lake situated in the middle of the depression. The lake has generally an underground outlet through a grotto-vault of ice several thousands of feet high. At other places a river is to be seen, which has bored itself a hole through the ice-sheet, down which it suddenly disappears with a roar and din which are heard far and wide, and at a little distance from it there is projected from the ice a column of water, which, like a geyser with a large intermittent jet in which the water is mixed with air, rises to a great height. Now and then a report is heard, resembling that of a cannon shot fired in the interior of the icy mass. It is a new crevasse that has been formed, or if one is near the border of the ice-desert, an ice-block that has fallen down into the sea. For, like, ordinary collections of water, an ice-lake also has its outlet into the sea. These outlets are of three kinds, viz., _ice-rapids_, in which the thick ice-sheet, split up and broken in pieces, is pressed forward at a comparatively high speed down a narrow steeply-sloping valley, where ice-blocks tumble on each other with a crashing noise and din, and from which true icebergs of giant-like dimensions are projected in hundreds and thousands; _broad; slowly-advancing glaciers_, which terminate towards the sea with an even perpendicular face, from which now and then considerable ice-blocks, but no true icebergs, fall down; and _smaller stationary glaciers_, which advance so slowly that the ice in the brim melts away about as fast as the whole mass of ice glides forward, and which thus terminate at the beach not with a perpendicular face but with a long ice-slope covered with clay, sand, and gravel. The inland-ice on Novaya Zemlya is of too inconsiderable extent to allow of any large icebergs being formed. There are none such accordingly in the Kara Sea[89], and it is seldom that even a large glacier ice-block is to be met with drifting about.