Once we took a terrible plunge, over a vertical fall of not less than
twenty or thirty feet. But the water below the fall was very deep, a
profound hole having been quickly scooped out in the unfathomable ice
beneath, so that we did not strike bottom, as I had feared, but came
bobbing to the top again like a cork. Below this fall there was a very
long series of rapids, extending, it seemed, for miles upon miles, and we
shot down them with the speed of an express train, lurching from side to
side, and colliding with hundreds of ice floes. It must not be supposed
that we went through this experience without suffering any injuries. On
the contrary, our hands were all bleeding, our faces cut, Henry had one
eye closed by a blow, and our clothing, for we were not wearing our
Arctic outfit, was badly used up. Yet none of our injuries was really
serious, although we looked as if we had just come out of the toughest
kind of a street brawl.

But there is no use in prolonging the story of this awful ride. It seemed
to us to last for days upon days, though, in fact, the worst of it was
over within twelve hours after we were lifted from our moorings in the
valley. The tumbling stream gradually broadened out as it left the region
of the high mountains, and then we found ourselves in a district covered
with icy hills of no great elevation. But we could still see, by glances,
as the stream curved this way and that, the glittering peaks behind. It
was an appalling thing to watch many of the nearer hills as they suddenly
sank, collapsed, and disappeared, like pinnacles of loaf sugar melting
and falling to pieces in a basin of water.

Edmund said that all of the ice-hills and mounds through which we were
passing no doubt owed their existence to pressure from behind, in the
belt where the sun never rose, and where the ice was piled up in actual
mountains. These foothills were, in fact, enormous glaciers thrust out