Greenland, the most extensive of the Arctic lands, begins with the lofty promontory of Cape Farewell, the southern extremity of a group of rocky islands, which are separated by a channel five miles wide from a table-land of appalling aspect, narrow to the south, but increasing in breadth northward to a distance of which only 1300 miles are known. This table-land is bounded by mountains rising from the deep in mural precipices, which terminate in needles and pyramids, or in parallel terraces of alternate snow and bare rock, occasionally leaving a narrow shore. The coating of ice is so continuous and thick that the surface of the table-land may be regarded as one enormous glacier, which overlaps the rocky edges and dips between the mountain peaks into the sea.

The coasts are beset with rocky islands, and cloven by fiords which, in some instances, wind like rivers for 100 miles into the interior. These deep inlets of the sea, now sparkling in sunshine, now shaded in gloom, are hemmed in by walls of rock often 2000 feet high, whose summits are hid in the clouds. They generally terminate in glaciers, which are sometimes forced on by the pressure of the upper ice plains till they fill the fiord and even project far into the sea like bold headlands, when, undermined by the surg'e, huge masses of ice fall from them with a crash like thunder, making the sea boil.