It no longer blew hard, but it was still a fresh breeze, spray-clouded in the frequent guns of it that shrieked in gusts over the bulwarks to the loftier lifts of the hull. But what my sight went to and remained fastened upon whilst, I own, my breath came and went quickly with the surprise of the magnificent, but to us the terrible, sight, was the scene of the southern quarter of the sea. There, stretching for miles and miles, was ice in bergs which to the naked sight looked to lie so close, the picture was that of a compacted coast of alabaster, broken with pinnacles and acclivities of a thousand shapes, curving in places as though in bays, the whole on either hand dying out in films of white, whilst over the bows and over the stern, too, every time we rose to the height of a sea I saw ice, plentiful as the breasts of the canvas of a vast fleet; and through the southern sky low down ran a long glinting line or gleam as though a continent of ice was reflected in its face; it was like the pearly radiance that hovers just off the edges of sails when lightly swelling in the tropics against a soft blue sky.
I glanced at Miss Otway: she was staring at the sight with large nostrils and a gaze of terror under the little frown that the strain of her gaze had knitted her brows into.
'That is ice,' she cried.
'Ay, miles of it' said I. 'But is there nothing good for us amidst that prodigious huddle of sail-like stuff?'
I took the telescope out of the companion and knelt with it to steady the tubes, and slowly and carefully swept the whole of that wonderful range, from film to film blue in the air. The sun's rosy light was full upon it; only the brush of an artist could show you what I saw as the surge ran me into a clear view of the horizon. It looked like a hundred cities of marble and alabaster, all of them going to pieces. It was no compact coast. There were many wide gaps, titanic streets fit for the tread of such ocean giant-spirits as would inhabit those colossal structures of crystal. The nearest point seemed about ten miles distant. All was clear sea between, and northwards I saw no ice.
Miss Otway stood beside me holding by a belaying pin in the rail. Again and again she would say:
'Do you see any signs of a ship? Is not that the canvas of a ship—there, just where your telescope now points?'
I saw no ship, but I looked with impassioned intentness till my eyeball seemed to melt dim through the lens under the brass it was pressed against, conceiving that in so vast an arm of ice some vessel might lie embayed.
CHAPTER XVI THE AURORA AUSTRALIS
Whilst slowly sweeping the ice with the glass, I saw, or seemed to see, when the lenses pointed a little to the eastward of south, a blue shadow of land in the air. I took my eye away from the telescope and then the shadow was gone: I looked again through the glass and there it was, a dim, scarcely distinguishable liquid dye whitening as it climbed till it melted in the azure.
I very well knew that shadow must be land, probably one of the mountainous rocks of the South Orkneys; unless indeed it was that group which lies north-east of the South Shetlands—forming one of them, in short: but I could not persuade myself that our drift to the westwards had been so considerable. I said to Miss Otway:
'Do you see a shadow in the air yonder?'
She looked, preserving the frown of an intense stare, and replied:
'No; I see no shadow.'
I directed the glass; she put her eye to it and cried quickly, 'Yes; I see it.'
'It is land,' said I.
She looked eagerly at me and said, 'Inhabited land?'
'I'll not say so, but I believe they go sealing there. I've heard of whalers heaving-to and sending ashore.'
'For what?'
'I don't know.'
I put away the glass and said:
'I've been afraid of that land; but when I think of it, best after all for us, Miss Otway, it should be there. Only, how to come at it? What's our drift and where are we? Shall we wash perhaps round yonder point of film, clearing the whole blocking mass, to light, may be, upon some spouter crawling northwards from ten degrees lower south? Or—or——' But I broke off, for what was the good of conjecturing unless I could say something to bring a little of the poor girl's heart into her eyes?
On the chance of something lying hidden round a point of crystal I went forward, lowered the lantern, and ran the red flag aloft, jack down. This done, I fetched a sextant from the captain's cabin and stood with Miss Otway in the shelter of the companion-way waiting for the sun to cross his meridian, meanwhile searching the line of the ice, beholding the phantasy of a ship's white sails over and over again, and conversing with the girl.
The sea came ridging steadily out of north-west, the vast westerly swell of the mighty Southern Ocean pulsing through it in rounds so majestically regular, you didn't notice the heave of it. I had never beheld a more glorious breast of ocean. All was dark blue sparkling billows, heads of froth tossing into silken veils upon the wind, a roaring, flashing scene, deep blue above, looking in its silence down, and the ice southward, like a coast cut in ivory white, motionless, shining, coming and going as the hull sank and soared.
I got an observation and eagerly went below to work it out. Miss Otway followed me into the captain's cabin and watched me whilst I calculated. I made the latitude sixty degrees ten minutes south, and the longitude exactly forty-five degrees west. Then, looking at the chart, I judged that that shadow of land which was showing miles past the barrier of ice was some central mountain of Coronation Island, towering high four thousand five hundred feet. I marked the hull's place on the chart, and said:
'This is where we are.'
She peered, and after a pause exclaimed: 'It is all desolation down here! Look how far we are off from Cape Horn. There is no nearer civilisation than the Falkland Islands—how many hundreds of miles distant! Oh!' she cried, lifting her head and clapping her hand to her face, 'if we could but hoist even a little sail to save us from drifting to the ice and certain death.'
'No,' I exclaimed, 'death's not aboard yet, not even in sight. Sixty degrees south! The whalers make nothing of that. The Great Circle carries you lower;' but I would not add 'not here.'
Then, my eye going to a bookshelf, I spied a volume which I pulled down quickly. It was a directory to these seas. I searched the pages, and, putting my finger upon a paragraph, said:
'See here now, Miss Otway: men have visited this land, they have named it, surveyed it, sounded round about it, described it. Where one has been others may venture. Look at this,' and I read: '"At daylight on the morning of the 12th January 1823, we saw some pigeons and at six o'clock perceived the east end of the islands of South Orkneys bearing W. by S. distant about eleven leagues. We carried all possible sail to get under the land, but the wind soon became light and left us almost at the mercy of a heavy swell in the midst of ice islands, which made our navigation truly hazardous."'
'Their ship had masts and sails,' she exclaimed, 'and was under command.'
I read on, eager to learn all the book could tell me.
'"Being now close under the land I sent a boat from each vessel to explore them. We continued to tack the vessels about in a bay. The icebergs which form in the bays in winter and break away in the summer now produced so much drift ice that we had frequently to tack ship to avoid striking it."'
'That's it!' she cried. 'Their ship was under command.'
I proceeded: '"This coast is, if possible, more terrific in appearance than the South Shetland. The tops of the islands for the most part terminate in craggy towering peaks, and look not unlike the mountain tops of a sunken island. The loftiest of these summits, towering up to a point, I denominated Noble's Peak. This peak in a clear day may be seen at the distance of fifteen leagues."'
'Is that the shadow?' she asked.
'Possibly.'
'Oh! look at the book, Mr. Selby, and see if it says that the island's inhabited.'
'It's not inhabited,' I answered.
Then I stood with my finger upon the page musing upon the brief account. There was little to interest outside of what I had read aloud: the rest told of bearings and distances, and what had been brought up by the lead.
'But,' said I, looking at the girl, 'we are not stranded yet. That we've drifted south is sure; but how much westing has there been in this tumbling drive? Here's all about the currents shown here,' and I turned the leaves of the book and read:
'"Ten miles south of Cape Horn the ocean stream flows east-north-east, half to one mile in the hour." That should be good for us. Let this wind shift south or west, and the swell and the run of the sea will drive the hulk out of sight of the barrier.'
But I had something more to do just then than talk, basing chat on small hope and weak conjecture. I saw to the fire in the stove, then went on deck to sound the well; the pump was hard frozen as before. I freed it and got a cast, and found that no water had drained in since I last sounded. I'll not swear to an inch or two, but the depth was quite unimportant, and after readjusting the pump I took the glass for another long look at the ice.
It was land, sure enough, at the back of the barrier; the pearly blue shadow stood a clear shape in the lens, and I seemed to see it now with my bare sight when I looked a little away to right or left of it. I carefully took its bearings, also the bearings of certain defined features of what I call the barrier, though, as I have said, it was a length of dislocated stuff full of yawns and wide winding openings, with a menace of the revelation of many grotesque mighty shapes, startling miracles of form beyond the reach of the dreams of fever, should we be set close. There was a sort of salt sparkle upon the range in some places; and now, whilst looking over the side, I saw, streaming up the slant of a surge, a pistol-shot distant, a mass of the giant kelp of these waters: but I observed no birds, nothing more than that kelp to hint at the meaning of that distant shadow in the air.
It was miserable that I could not get the least idea of our drift save by waiting and watching, which presently became a sort of anguish. I sought, but could nowhere find, the deep-sea lead, or certainly I should have dropped it over the side, taking my chance of its finding bottom, and lying there to show by the angle of the line into what quarter of the sea we were drifting—whether we were making straight for the heart of the range, as it looked, or laterally rolling towards the south-western extremity of the ice.
The weather continued of a clear cold splendour, the horizon sharp-edged against the sky as the rim of a tumbler. The sea ran hard in spiteful foaming slopes which kept on shouldering the hulk dead to leeward, and within an hour the growth of the ice told me we were closing it; in fact, by the bearings I had taken I saw that the drive of the hull was as fair for the heart of the barrier as if she was being steered for it!
What was to be done? I had been cast in my time in many situations of peril, yet had never known myself despairful even in the blackest hour of my troubles: but I own my heart fell now, my spirits sank, hope died when I looked at those leagues of horizon of ice and reflected upon my helplessness. Could I have summoned the help of but another pair of hands I might have made some desperate effort with capstan and leading-blocks to cap the stump of the foremast with another height of spar, and get a jib stretched that her head might pay off and bring her under some sort of control to enable me to thread the waterways betwixt the bergs. But, single-handed, I could do nothing. There was no height of foremast for the setting of any sort of rag that would round her head away and keep her before it—I mean, in a fashion to hold her responsive to the helm.
When I made the discovery that the hull was setting dead on to the ice, Miss Otway was in the cabin boiling some cocoa for a scrambling afternoon meal; she came up while I stood swaying on the heave of the plank, my arms tightly folded, my eyes rooted to the ice; instantly it was as clear to her as to me whither our drift was tending, and she uttered a low cry as though she had been struck.
The mere sight of her, however, did me good—it quickened perception of my obligations as a man. Her face was white as the foam over the side; her pale lips moved, but the shrill wind sheared with icy-edge through her words as they came to her lips. She sent a blind, staggering glance round the western and northern sea line, and, knitting her face into a look of resolution, she said:
'It is God's will. But, Mr. Selby, it is a dreadful death to die.'
'I am pleased when you look so,' said I, 'but not when you speak so. It is God's will, as you say. But what is that will? What's to be our fate? Look how those blue shadows in the ice open and widen. The bergs appear close together; hundreds of fathoms separate them in reality, and if we are to drift into the huddle why shouldn't we scrape through?'
'To where?'
'To where?... There may be open water beyond, and a ship.'
'No, no, land!' she cried, 'land! See the shadow of it. It was visible in the telescope only a little while ago: now I see it like a forming cloud. It will be all ice to the rocks, and some break will let us in and we shall drift deep and be locked up and left—and left——'
And now she could scarcely articulate for some spasm in her throat, and her poor white face was all awork with the horrors of her imagination.
It made me sullen to hear her, she reasoned so well, beyond any trick that I had for cheering her.
'We must wait and hope,' said I; 'we are not in the ice yet; there may come a ship.'
And setting my teeth I swung the glass out of its brackets fiery with some passing mood of wrath born of hopelessness and helplessness; for no sailor will stand at gaze and be deserted by his spirit as a man whilst there is a chance for life, though it be dim as a corposant in a burst of wet squall; but put him in my place—as I then was; aboard a dismasted hull rolling to her waterways in a steady pouring sea, a doom of ice filling the horizon to leeward: how should a sailor act as a man then save by a stony endurance that sounds gallantly if you call it heroic fortitude?
But the girl had boiled some cocoa: it waited: so I begged leave to hand her below out of the ceaseless howl of the ice-charged wind. Yet neither of us stayed long. She could not eat, and for my part 'twas as much as I could do to gulp down the steaming cocoa, good as it was.
I believe the sun set soon after two; the sky was everywhere of a wild crimson, flashing gorgeously where the luminary was; the sea came running in hard green lines, tall with passing heads, out of the splendour; then the ice was a wonderful scene indeed, delicately tinctured as it was with the redness. The shadow of the land hung afar in a dim, pink cloud, but though the barrier had been plain in view for some while I could not swear that within the last hour we had sensibly closed it. This gave me a little hope—though I didn't know any: I bade Miss Otway note it and she agreed with me—she had a sailor's eye for atmospheric distance—that the ice looked no nearer than it had within the past hour.
'Can we be in the grip of a westerly current?' thought I. Then, before the blaze faded in the west, I hauled down the flag and hoisted the burning lantern, for the delicate figures of the ice in the remote recesses where the film of it died out were so cheating in their likeness to ships lifting canvas and heading for us, that I could not persuade myself but one must prove a vessel—if not now, then presently.
I obliged Miss Otway to go below when the night fell. It was too cold for her. She was like to freeze to death. The ice loomed as a range of snow-covered cliff to leeward: it showed of a savage and deadly paleness under the stars which sheeted down weakly to it, though here and there one brighter than the rest glowed like a lighthouse lantern on some faint point. It was a wonderfully brilliant night, however, no moon that I remember, but overhead the larger stars had the rich tremble you see in the tropics; I had never seen such a field of brilliants—the stardust hovered like mist, and the height of the sky that night was awful to my solitary gaze.
At about eight o'clock we were, as I reckoned, about five miles distant from the nearest elbow of the ice. But though a tall sea still ran, giving the hull the lofty motions of a stately dancer, the wind was sensibly taking off. A frightful time was this! for if the hull struck on the hurl of such a surge as still roared under us, she would go to pieces in the twinkling of an eye. I was constantly looking over the side, reckoning to find us setting on to some detached mass of drift stuff, flat, but not the less deadly for being awash, but saw none. Suddenly I perceived a light upon the horizon right over the bows. I fancied my vision deceived me, that the trend of the ice was not as I imagined it to be in that darkness, that the light was some burning mountain far past the barrier, and that a shift of wind or change of stream or tide had altered the bearings: this I conceived and rushed headlong for a bull's-eye, which I flashed upon the compass; but no! the indications were as before.
What, then, was that light ahead? Miss Otway had followed me when I fled up the companion steps with a lighted bull's-eye.
'What is it?' she cried.
'What's that?' I exclaimed, pointing ahead in the starlight.
But now, looking, I beheld a luminous arched cloud: it soared, always arched, increasing in brightness till the brow of it stood about twenty degrees above the horizon: the brightest of the stars shone wanly through it: then, whilst we watched, flashes of fire, darting like lightning, leapt from it; they changed into spiral columns of the brilliance of sunlight, scores of them, and they went twisting and streaming out of the cloud with the look of the rush of the Milky Way to the Zenith, whirling and winding their strands of fire into a very rope of flame, whose end seemed to search the furthest stardust. This wonderful, beautiful, sublime scene of joyous dancing, inwreathing lights, faded, but was quickly followed in the same quarter where the fiery curved cloud had shone by rich, straw-coloured arches of flame, linking and sinking and soaring, changing on a sudden with a vast spread of light, exactly fan shaped, and jewelled with colours manifold as the rainbow, as though it reflected some giant prism.
'What is it?' said Miss Otway, standing close beside me and speaking in a voice subdued by awe and astonishment.
'The Aurora Australis,' I answered, knowing it must be that by descriptions I remembered.
We lost all sense of time in watching. In some of the sublimest recesses of that show of fire it was as though the heaven of God were opening: one held one's breath not knowing what the next revelation would be, what spectacle of winged spirit shapes would glance upon one's mortal vision out of those chasms of splendour which looked, with the glory that burned in them, to have been cloven to the very Throne.
'Mark this!' I cried, and as I spoke—the vast fan of light then fading and no more lightning-like fire leaping—the wind that had been a fresh breeze dropped as if by magic: the sky over the bows darkened into its night of stars: the sea fell into a sloppy tumble, and within a quarter of an hour the hull was rolling quietly upon the long, wide swell of these seas with so oil-like a calm upon the steady run of the folds that, close to our port quarter, I watched the image of a bright star lengthen and shrink as it rode, till, but for the intense, dread cold of the atmosphere, you would have thought yourself becalmed near the line.
'We may drift north and go clear after all,' said I, taking the lighted bull's-eve out of the companion and looking at the binnacle by it.
'Do you hear the thunder?' said Miss Otway, following me.
I listened: it was not thunder but the crackling of ice. There was no roar of sea, no howl of gale now to kill that sound; it rolled up through the night from the southward in bursts and shocks like explosions of heavy artillery; it swept over the smooth swell which looked liked smoking grease as the huge rounds noiselessly floated eastward, and it sounded as though a thunderstorm were raging over the ice.
And still that brief peace that was in the night, spite of the distant thundering of the ice, was a wonderful refreshment to the spirits after the ceaseless flush of the surge to the side and the steady roar of the gale on high, shrieking as it split upon the barbs of ice the length of bulwarks bristled with. More: a change of weather might now happen to drive us northward, to drift us clear of the bergs, at all events, and so extend our chance of being fallen in with and rescued.
I stayed on deck till after nine watching anxiously for any signs of a change of weather. Miss Otway came and went: she was too restless and fearful to linger below, but the frost in the night wind was too stinging to allow her to remain long above. When I went into the cabin I left the hull rolling slowly upon a swell of the sea polished as ebony; nay, so glass-like was that swollen mirror that all about us the water was sprinkled with the images of stars, with one ice-like wake swinging like a pendulum as the silver of it seemed to sink.
I mixed a tumbler of hot rum and sat down before the stove to smoke a pipe, with the young lady's consent; there was a good stock of tobacco, cigars, and a little collection of pipes in the cabin that had been occupied by Captain and Mrs. Burke. Our talk was, you will suppose, all about our situation. I assured her there was little to fear saving the ice; and talked—the thing then coming into my head—of a sailor who had gone sealing for three years with one Captain Smyley; this same skipper having spent nearly half a century betwixt the River Plate and the South Shetlands.
'These waters are plentifully frequented,' said I. 'A century ago in such a case as this we shouldn't have had much to hope for. What was to come? In half a year a score of yellow, humpbacked, round bowed waggons blowing away under bladder-like sails, with topmast struck and nothing but the log to tell the longitude—that was about the sum of the navigation. There was no Australia then; nothing but a Western American coast yielding a month's saunter from Acapulco to the Philippines—wonderful that they should have ever got a Spaniard to face the ice down here.'
'Did they?'
'Why, yes; they sent treasure to Europe in galleons named after saints, and when they saw a waterspout they held up their swords as crosses, and bade the thing be off in Latin.'
'Ships were as safe then as they are now,' said she, pulling off a thick glove and toasting her hand, on which sparkled a diamond or two. 'Why should this vessel have been dismasted? What progress is there to boast of when you think of this hull? Can't they plant masts which will keep erect?'
'Had that been, you and all others who were here when the squall struck you would be deeper under water than the fangs of the biggest iceberg afloat,' I answered, with a half smile at her eager gravity, as though there were nothing to interest us now but shipbuilding!
'If my life is preserved I'll never go to sea again,' she said.
'You'll have had enough of it.'
'I came for my health and it seems I have come to die.'
'Has your health improved?'
'Yes—perhaps; I don't feel whilst I talk as if the voyage had done me much good.'
'You'll write an account of these experiences when you return, and the Queen will send for you that she may see and converse with as wonderful a heroine as ever flourished in her reign.'
'What have I done to be a heroine?'
I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and turned to lift the tumbler of grog that was yet half full; when my hand was arrested as though paralysed by an extraordinary noise, smooth, fierce, seething. I listened a moment, then sprang to the companion steps.
CHAPTER XVII THE THICK OF IT
My instant belief was we were foul of ice, scaling some side of crystal mountain smooth as though chiselled. But when I opened the companion door I was nearly flung to the bottom of the steps by a very volcanic shock of gale, white as a cloud with snow and hail. I sprang again and gained the deck, and, shutting the door, got to leeward of the companion.
A furious Cape Horn squall was blowing over the ocean in smoke—from what quarter I had then to find out. The still scene of starlight night and sluggish rolling ocean was vanished. Already, with the magical swiftness of the weather of these regions, a sea was got up and beginning to race and foam. There was nothing to see. The night was blind with howling storm. When I had left the deck there was not so much as a rag of cloud to be seen in the sky; and now it was blowing a whole gale, which looked to boil with the snow that fled with it, and everywhere it was of a midnight blackness.
The rush of the wind was over the port quarter; but then the hull would be slewing for the trough, and how her head was when I had gone below I could not have told. Keeping this bearing of the wind in mind, I rushed to the cabin, picked up the burning bull's-eye, and, springing to the captain's berth, darted the flame on to the tell-tale, and saw that this squall or gale was out of about south-south-west.
When I took my eyes from the compass I saw Miss Otway standing, white as milk, in the doorway.
'What is it?' she asked.
'A heavy squall—perhaps the first of a gale: but that,' said I, with a flourish of the bull's-eye to the compass, 'gives us good news; we shall blow clear of the ice. The wind is sou'-sou'-west. What do you say to that?' and, forcing the noise of a jolly laugh, I came out of the berth and hooked up the bull's-eye ready to my hand.
We had seen the ocean all day long, clear of ice north and east; icebergs we knew were there, but their summits had settled—our drift had put leagues betwixt them and us; therefore I was not immediately fearful—on the score of ice, I mean. But if it was going to blow as hard as I had just now felt it, what was to become of the hull? Such fury and weight of wind must speedily raise the seas into cliffs, and then God knows how it would fare with the sheer hulk with not a rag, nor the means of stretching a rag, to enable her to look up to it, to shoulder it off with her bow, to lie hove to, in short, as a ship should.
In an hour, the dance was wild even to madness; my own brain reeled to it; sick I was not in the sense of nausea. Was it sickness of soul then? But I recollect that many times when the hull fell off the top of a sea into the valley, sliding as though she was shooting off some Niagara-like edge, a horrible feeling of faintness and prostration attended the descent. Never before had I suffered so at sea; but then, never before had I been tossed in a dismasted hull in a gale of wind sixty degrees south latitude.
Miss Otway lay almost lifeless. I shored her up on a couch by backs of chairs which I lashed; I heaped clothes from her bed on her, and got hot brandy for her, and encouraged her as best I could. There was nothing to be done on deck. The sea was flying in white sheets over the waist and forecastle; the glare of the brine breaking close aboard showed you the snow; but looking around was like staring into a well.
It was a strange sort of snow, too, that fell. Once in the cabin I took notice of it on my coat: it was in small grains, round as shot, of a size from mustard seed to buckshot; a dry, pure white: not hail.
But two hours after the gale began, the snow ceased and the wind lessened; I watched from the companion-way, and observed but little water flying athwart. With such observations I was forced to be satisfied, and spent the hours in the cabin, keeping an eye on the stove, boiling a hot drink now and again for the life and support of it, tending Miss Otway, from time to time peering through the hatch where the iron sweep of the wind seemed to unflesh the face, wondering, for ever wondering, whether the next hurl would be followed by a crash of the side, and how long we should be in perishing when the hull split.
I should have in agined myself too anxious—nay, to put it plainly, too alarmed to sleep, and it seemed that I went up many times to take a look around; and still I must have slept, for I started from my chair in a sudden terror of dream or noise, and with a lurch of the hull fell upon my knees, but was up instantly.
The motion of the craft had changed; the moment I had my wits I felt that the sea was pyramidal, which told me there had been a quite recent shift of wind. I cannot imagine anything more dislocating, more unnerving, more brain sickening, than the leaps and rolls of the hull upon the sea that, by the movement, I knew was darting in almost perpendicular thrusts, spear shaped billows lifting in ebon darts and daggers, and putting a frightful wildness into the flings of the fabric.
Miss Otway lay with her eyes shut, and seemed asleep; a small fire glowed in the stove, and the lighted lantern swung in the centre of the cabin as though some invisible hand grasped it, seeking to jerk it off its hook. I took the bull's-eye and went on deck, and found the wind a dry gale, but observed a thickness as of fog in it, but it was too dark to make sure. I staggered to the binnacle and saw the wind was blowing out of north again: a cruel shift! I stared and smelt for ice, but saw no loom, and tasted no more than the freezing coldness of the blast.
What was the hour? I went below and found it half-past eight o'clock. Oh! what an interminable darkness was that! Where was the ice? It could not be far off. What and whither was our drift? I felt like a madman then.
Miss Otway slept on. I believe it might have been an hour and a half after I had awakened that, not knowing but that the poor young heart in her had been stopped by terror, or the delicate blood in her frozen, I stooped to view her face, the lamp burning dimly; she showed like a piece of exquisitely chiselled marble: I can't tell why, but her whiteness seemed to my mood to exactly fit the bitterness of this time, the frost, the snow, the ice, the wild gale and foaming waters; was I as mad then as I had felt some time before, to bend over her and get a fancy of her into my head as a spirit of these wild and desolate parts? Put yourself in my place and you'll not wonder to find your brow hot with fancies more desperately and tragically strange than such a crazy notion as this.
She opened her eyes whilst I looked, and I stood erect with a sigh of relief, half turning to fling my cap down whilst I ran the length of my sleeve along my forehead for the refreshment of the wet of the snow. She sat up and watched me, whilst I saw in her face she was heeding the extravagant tumbling of the hull.
'It seems to be blowing a gale,' she said.
'Ay,' said I, 'but we're still alive. Feel these jumps: no empty cask could better them.'
'Will you remove these chairs that I may sit up?'
I did so. Whilst I knelt beside her to cast the lashings adrift she eyed me intently, as though she would read my very brain; she then sighed, but said nothing, and the road being clear she drew her feet out of the covering and sought to rise, but, after a short struggle with the furious deck, sat again.
I stood before the stove waiting for daybreak, my eye glancing from one frothing cabin window to another and thence to the skylight. At last she said:
'You've a brave heart, Mr. Selby, but it can hold out no longer; I read despair in your face. If the end is to come, may it come quickly. You have behaved to me with a noble kindness. I can but thank you—I can but thank you,' and she held out her hand with her eyes full of tears.
I bowed my head over her hand; it was an excuse to fetch a breath or two, I would not just then trust myself to speak. Then said I:
'I'll not disguise the truth: our situation is perilous, as God, who, let us believe, is watching over us, knows. But I should be no true man to feel the despair you tell me you read in my face. Daylight may find us a sight to hearten us.'
She shook her head.
'Well, but don't let your spirits die. If a wish could help us I'd be above, if your safety was to be got at so small a cost. But see, now, I'll run up on deck and let you know if there's anything like the loom of ice about. It may prove all right with us—it may end in our lives being preserved.'
But all the same, with a heart as heavy as ever hers could be, I clawed my way to the companion steps for yet another stare into the blackness.
It was not yet daybreak; but when some while after the faint, grey light sifted through the blowing, swelling, roaring gloom, the sight struck to my very heart and I was sure we were doomed. The sea was running in hills of liquid lead; many clouds of mist were in the wind and they blew athwart the hull like bursts of steam; snow in places was rushing in horizontal lines out of dark low clouds flying southwards. Ice was all about us. The first object that dawn revealed, whilst I stood in the companion-way watching, was a mountain of ice on the bow; as features of it stole out a snow-squall looked to have fouled a whole stack of pinnacles on the left of the berg; it was dark as smoke there, with snow whirling in a very maelström of froth-like whiteness; the seas slipped their foam up its side to a height of fifty feet, and the brine flashed in clouds of crystals against the dull, marble-like face, which showed smooth as a wall through the haze and the whirl of flying vapour that shrieked athwart our decks to it.
It was but one. I counted twenty coming and going amid the shadows of the squalls and flying masses of fog. You would have supposed that a fleet somewhere hidden were firing great guns, so thunderous was the splintering of those bergs majestically rocking their mighty masses. The nearest—that on the starboard bow—was about a mile off. Others showed to port and astern: one heap, like an island, darkened the haze on the port bow. The gale had apparently broken up the barrier and we were in the thick of the floating bodies.
Miss Otway came to the foot of the companion steps and waited for me to make way for her. I stepped out and she ascended the steps and looked round the sea, but in silence. Her face was hardened into stone by despair. Hours of suspense and grief, hours spent in the most awful kind of loneliness the imagination can figure, with the darkness of the spirit of death for ever upon her heart, had done their work with the poor young lady: sensation was dumb.
And now there was nothing to do but await the end, come what might. I let her stand a little, looking, then taking her by the arm, gently but firmly, conducted her below and seated her where she had lain during the night. I was resolved that my own despair should not be visible to her, and partly to cover myself, so to speak, and partly for the good of the thing, I boiled some coffee, and put food on the deck near the stove; but one looked at such a repast with the emotions of a malefactor to whom breakfast is served whilst the hangman waits.
Whilst I was at this work she addressed me calmly:
'There is no doubt, I suppose, that we shall strike the ice?'
'It's most inevitable,' I answered.
'If it happens, shall we be better off down here than on deck?'
'Let it happen,' said I.
'If we are to strike the ice,' she said, 'I should wish to be drowned quickly. I would rather die at once than be thrown soaked on the ice to lie a little and freeze—it would take time—I fear the sufferings. I am not afraid of death, I wish it to be quick.'
'There's no ice nearer to us than a mile, that I can make out,' I said, then handed her a pannikin of coffee. 'Pray drink this.'
She took it and raised it to her lips.
'If the hull strikes, will it go to pieces instantly?' she asked.
'Who can tell? She might beach herself and find us a home till the berg floated north, where the smoke of our fire will be seen.'
She sank into silence with her eyes fastened upon the deck. When I offered her food she shook her head. My breakfast consisted of half a cup of coffee.
Within a quarter of an hour I was on deck again, but the scene was the same as before, saving that the ice mountain that had been upon our starboard bow was now right ahead, whilst on our starboard quarter, within perhaps half a mile, was a small island of ice, about sixty feet high, not before visible. The compass gave me the wind blowing steadily from one quarter. But then I could make nothing of bearings within three or four points on board a helpless hull, swinging in a high sea, with a send of her head when she was rushed out of a hollow that made me sometimes think she was going to give her stern to the weather.
At one o'clock it was a savage and tremendous scene of warring waters and flying sky of soot, and giant forms of ice vanishing and reappearing amid headlong flights of wool-white vapour, and through all, in deep notes, ran the thunder of the surge-smitten, frozen heights, with frequent rending and crashing noises of dislocation. I was now very sure that our drift was not less than three miles an hour, and perhaps four. This I gathered by observing a vast shape of ice that suddenly showed off the starboard bow. It was nearly a mile long, and I should think two hundred feet high. It was a grand, truly sublime ocean piece, with its numerous lofty arches and caverns, out of which the sea, in recoil, flashed in immense bursts of foam. I spied the white wings of birds glancing upon it, but I had it not often very clear in sight, for the steam-like smother drove down at quick intervals, leaving some pale eminence gleaming on high against the whirl of the clouds, to vanish in some swift outfly of snow, so that the whole thing would be as completely gone to the eye as if it had sunk.
But by staying and watching it as often as it emerged in whole or in part, I got at the rate of our drift. It was quickly on our port bow with others coming out of the thickness to leeward, all wild and terrific in that dull light of storm, with the glare of the leaping foam at their base and their own ghastly stare through the rent curtains of cloud flying under the dark sky.
Soon after two, when it was almost dark, I thought we were lost, for I saw the loom of an iceberg right abeam to leeward; but whether it was God's guidance of the devoted hull, or that the set of the long rolling sea ran a sort of sweep of tide round these floating islands, when we were within a musket shot of the mass, with an occasional shock of loose ice sounding through the hulk, our drift made a little departure. I vow it was for all the world as though the fabric was alive and, dreading her fate, avoided it, or as though she were under command, with a cool hand and a critical eye for sea measurement at the helm. Certain it is we drove past clear; it might be that we owed our preservation to the rebound of the sea.
It was almost black with the night when that berg was on our lee quarter, but I knew by a sudden enormous roar of water, and by an indescribably hissing sound lasting for a few minutes, as though a thousand locomotives were blowing off steam, that an immense mass of the island had fallen, not very many ships' lengths distant, which I have no genius to do justice to, nor even to communicate, though I need but close my eyes to behold the terrible picture, with its uproar of trampling seas, and howling wind, and cracking masses. A little after four in the morning, whilst I sat in the cabin with Miss Otway, every instant expecting the hull to strike, her motions grew suddenly quiet. I felt her rise and fall upon a long swell, and knew instinctively by the feel of her that she was under the lee of something.
I sprang to my feet and ran on deck. It was pitch dark, with a strange phantasmal glimmer on either hand, so vague, so indeterminable I could not see it when I looked at it. The roar of the gale, the hiss and beat of the driven seas, came as from a distance. Thrice as high as the masthead of a ship sounded the low, continuous thunder of the wind, as though it blew over mountain tops; but down where we were it was calm. Icy gusts came in moans from half a dozen quarters. The long, invisible heave was as rhythmic as the ocean pulse of swell. I understood we were embayed and foresaw certainly now that our being stranded, or being hammered to pieces against the ice, was only a question of minutes.
I went into the cabin with a loathing of life coming into me out of the sheer despair that was as frost on my heart, caring not a curse how it went, so sick I was of it all after the unendurable hours of watching and expectation I had passed through; and then again I felt that, whatever was to happen, it was right I should be by the poor girl's side: not that it was in my power to comfort her—not, indeed, if the hull went to pieces, that I could be of the least use to her or myself, but I was company for her, and out of me she'd get some solace of companionship in what I reckoned these dying minutes of ours.
'Has the wind fallen? Where are we?' she shrieked as I approached her.
'We are embayed,' I answered. 'We are got under the lee of something.'
Just as I spoke those words a harsh, grating roar ran through the hull; the vessel trembled as though in the first throe of bursting; another like roar succeeded; I felt the thrill of the scraping of the bilge and keel as the fabric was rushed by some ponderous heave of swell. Again, another huge thrust of the sea, another long roar of scraping keel and bilge, another quiver and thrill throughout the hulk as though every timber was straining ere flying to the shock of an explosion. She lay right over to starboard. The lamp swung and lay hard against the upper deck. Whatever was movable fetched away. So acute was the angle that Miss Otway, unable to maintain her seat upon the couch, shot from it to me; but I was firmly planted, saw her coming, and received her so that she was not hurt, and with a vigorous swing I cleared and placed her breathless and moaning in a cleated armchair that stood close to where I sat.
The blind, soft, thunderous thrusts of the sea continued. I heard the water in tons washing over the decks, but every time this happened a roar of grinding and scaling shook the hull as she was driven by the wash of the swell higher and yet higher. The companion was closed and no water descended. I knew by the noise of the sea that the hull lay broadside to the swing of the swell. I got out of my chair, but was heavily thrown, and could scarcely regain my feet, so extreme was the slant, and so completely did it pin me against the cabin wall.
As regular as the rush of the floating folds was the thrust of them, and now I grew sensible that the heave was like to strand us high and dry, the job of it being a different labour than rocks or the grit of the beach of earth would have made, so greasy was the ice. The water poured over the decks every time the swell struck the hull, but in a little while I found each volume to be weakening in weight, and after the fabric had been driven in this grinding way in a sort of pulsing of blows, deafening with the bursts of the brine against the side and over the decks, each onward slide grew shorter and shorter, until presently she lay without motion, with an occasional shudder running through her from the beat of the sea, but at intervals so varying as to persuade me she was fairly high and dry, and within the wash of the foam of the larger rollers only.
But the list or angle was horrible. I was unable to move without going on all fours. I crawled in this wise to Miss Otway, and told her to remain where she was, not to attempt to stir lest she should break her neck, whilst I crept on deck to take a look at our situation if it was visible.
'What has happened do you think?' she cried.
'We are stranded upon some beach of an ice island I expect,' I replied.
'Hark to that!' she shrieked, as a sudden sea smote the bilge and roared in foaming recoil. 'If you go on deck you'll be washed away.'
'I'll see to it. That blow was weak. We have been thrust high. Feel what a desperate slope it is. I pray God no sudden shock of sea may launch us afresh.'
With that I crawled to the companion steps, every bone aching like rheumatism with the contortions of my figure in my efforts to move.
CHAPTER XVIII IMPRISONED
I might have guessed there would be no more to see now than when I had first looked. I stood in the companion with my head just out, holding the door as close shut as it would lie with my body in the way; and hardly had I put my head through when a whole green sheet of water tumbled over the port bulwarks and roared in a cataractal deluge down the steep, boiling white, through the wreckage of smashed bulwarks. I ducked, but not in time to stop a rush into the cabin.
I guessed, by the uncommon blackness, that we were in a hollow betwixt high cliffs; I beheld an illusive paleness, the vague, spectral faintness of rocks of ice or snow-covered acclivities on either hand, but no features of them were in the least degree discernible. I durst not let go of the companion to look over the side, but I judged by the deep, hollow noise overhead that a strong gale still blew, and from a distance came the strong, coarse seething of a high sea.
Still, the beat of the swell against the hull was not often now, which made me suspect it was no iceberg we had stranded on but land, one of the New Orkneys or South Shetlands group, because the bating of the swell told that a tide ran, and I had read in that book about the South Atlantic in the cabin that the rise and fall of the tide down here was very considerable, that gales of wind often swelled the water high above its natural level, as was shown by the many skeletons of whales found lying twenty or thirty feet above high-water mark.
But until the dawn broke nothing could be imagined; I closed the companion door and crawled back to where Miss Otway sat.
She was so postured by the angle of the deck that she could not get out of her chair; she begged me to help her; I drew her out and held her until she had sunk upon the floor, and then I sat down beside her on the hard plank, the carpet having been rolled up and stowed away when the cabin was flooded in the outfly that had dismasted the 'Lady Emma.' Not so much water as I supposed had tumbled down; it lay the length of the cabin wall and was fast draining off.
'Have you been able to see where we are?' she exclaimed.
'No. But though there's no doubt we've beached on ice, I believe the land's close aboard.'
'What land?'
'Coronation Island, if any. That was the island in the way of our drift; we've been making a straight course for it.'
We paused to hearken to a heavy flooding of water overhead, but the blow that had sheeted the brine over the hull was as weak as a summer ripple is to an angry surge compared with the thumps which had driven us to where we now lay.
'The sea will have made a clean sweep of the decks,' said she.
'There was little to go. What but the galley? The companion has weathered it out, happily for us.'
'Oh, Mr. Selby, what can we now do? What is to become of us?' she cried with sudden hysteric passion of grief and terror.
'We must find out where we are. Better here, anyway, than knocking about among the ice outside, with the prospect every next minute of being squashed into pulp. Oh, that was too terrible to have gone on bearing! The perpetual apprehension was like to have driven us overboard, mad. Why, this is peace, this is rest.'
'What a time it has been! What a time it is!' she cried. 'When will the day break? If we are upon an iceberg——'
She was arrested by a second thunder-shock of water overhead, yet weak as a blow of the sea, though the hull trembled fore and aft.
The lamp glowed and shed a good light, the body of it lying hard against the upper deck, so sharp was the angle; it was strange to see it stirless there, strange to feel the stillness of the hull, save when a blow of swell made her quiver. The fire was out; but even had not all the fuel fetched away into the wash of the wet, I had not dared kindle a fresh one, lest in the trembling fit then upon me, and on such a roof-like slope as that, I should stumble, or by some helpless flourish set the ship in flames.
I crawled on my knees to the couch, and pulled the clothes from it and covered Miss Otway with them, swathing her head and so wrapping her that nothing showed but a little piece of the face. The poor girl's teeth chattered, and she shivered ceaselessly. By carefully crawling I got upon the table and managed to get hold of a glass and a decanter of wine. She drank a little and I took a good pull of the wine myself. Indeed it was an extraordinary situation—the hull on her beam ends, the cabin alight, we two crouched on the deck, the stillness after the fury we had come through, the stillness, I say, saving a low roar of distant sea, with an occasional beat of the swell upon the hulk, and the scaling and rushing of water overhead. An amazing situation indeed; there is nothing like it, nothing stranger in the maritime records, that I can recollect.
At last the starboard cabin windows, high in the broadside, showed of a pale steel grey; I went on my hands and feet to the steps and reached the deck. I stood a little while in the companion-way thunderstruck; I was confounded and could not credit my sight. The hull lay stranded in a very well of ice. Ahead and astern rose masses of cliffs to an altitude of four or five hundred feet. The vessel lay on a frozen beach; 'twas a sloping sweep of the stuff, apparently linking the iceberg astern to the ice over the bows. The bight or bay we had drifted into was ramparted by the iceberg which sank from a vast terrace to a point in an arm of natural breakwater like marble; but the ice ahead was fixed to the face of the land. After looking a little I spied the iron frown of dusky rocks perpendicular and smooth as though planed, showing amidst the snow.
Past the hinder ice and beyond the giant limb of marble-like breakwater was the rolling ocean. It still blew hard, the seas raced angrily. Whatever of ice they smote they flashed upon; over the lower parts of the ice terrace the surge was bursting in lofty clouds, bright as light. The heave came round the point in a wide swell, which did not break in foam upon the beach where we lay, but swept silent, in a glass-green volume, along the slope, just as the foamless lift of the sea washes past the side of a ship; it broke only where it met with anything rugged, and quickly lost its weight in the curve, soundlessly recoiling from the base of the iceberg astern, though mightily troubling the surface of the water by conflict with the succeeding heave.
The sky between the cliffs was wild with flying scud and rusty brown masses of vapour rushing southwards. The vessel lay close in to the land; she rested on her side at an angle of hard upon fifty degrees. On either hand was open sky, the picture of it to port showing as at the extremity of an immense ravine. Save but for sudden, quick shootings of little short-lived draughts and blasts, the calm and even the repose down here was as though we were in a well. The swell never swept nearer to us than twenty feet. I crept to the side and lay over, watching anxiously, and thus made sure of this after following the quiet sweep of at least twenty successive heaves of brine.
The desolation was awful! The picture savage, forbidding, terrifying beyond imagination to one immured with its clouded crystal heights over the bows, and the rugged slopes of ice over the stern forking into fifty shapes of pinnacle, turret, spire, column, tower, as though on the flat of the summit were the ruins of a city of marble.
The decks were swept of everything save the companion. Wheel, binnacle, capstans, galley, all were gone. I watched the ocean rolling past the arm of ice astern, it was but a bit of it. The great berg that formed the bay blocked the view of the deep; there was nothing to see but the abrupt white walls ahead and astern, and the flying soot overhead and away down to port, and, on the right, tall cliffs of ice and snow glazing the land, with here and there a space of staring, black rock.
Our isolation was shocking. My heart seemed to stop whilst I looked around, realising the terrors and hopelessness of this new imprisonment by the granite-hued light that was gaining a little in power. Though a whaler stood within half a mile of the coast, how should she see us? It would be hard enough to discern the speck of wreck we made had the bay of ice in which we rested gaped naked to the sea, but we were as much hidden here as if we had gone to the bottom. We were worse off, indeed, than had we stranded upon a floating berg, because in that case we might have fallen in with the ice which might have split and freed us; but now we were aground upon ice hardening into the face of an island and stationary; months might pass before the body we were upon broke away and became a water-borne bulk, and then, in the throes of the liberation of the frozen cliffs, what of splintering, of volcanic-like upheaval and disruption might happen to crush the little toy of hull lying after many months as she lay now?
I don't doubt I stared about me with something of a madman's wildness, glancing up at the inaccessible heights, then at the sea rolling in white lines beyond the limb of ice, then into the desolation of the whirling sky on the left, till, recollecting that I had a companion who looked to me for heart and encouragement, whom, by God's mercy, wonderful as it would afterwards appear, I might yet be the means of delivering from this hideous situation, I pulled my wits together and returned to the cabin.
The poor young lady was on the deck before the black stove as I had left her. She could not have stood upon that angle of plank without danger and distress. She began to question me in a voice that shuddered with the cold. I answered I would talk with her when I had lighted a fire, for I had now some spirit and saw things a little clearly, and was no longer afraid of setting the hull in flames.
I split up a bunk board, and picked a bucket full of capsized coal out of the wash to leeward, as I may call it, and made a fire; but I moved with pain and difficulty; the decks were wet, and as slippery as though coated with ice, and the slope was that of a ship bulwarks under.
When the fire was blazing I helped the young lady to sit close beside it, and went on deck for some life-lines for this cabin. I moved with less trouble above, for the life-lines I had before set up were still stretched along. Every rope that I handled was like bar iron, but with infinite trouble I succeeded in getting a length below and stretching it here and there, which done I was able to use my legs with some freedom.
The stove was violently aslant, but it was possible to boil a kettle, and whilst I waited for a hot drink I crouched beside the girl, grateful for the comforting heat of the flames. I told her plainly that we were stranded and ice-locked; that we must resolve to exert our patience and make the best of our deplorable situation. She cleared her head of the cover I had wrapped about her, and stared at me dumbly for a minute or two with a face as white as though moonlit, and her fair hair full of sparkles with the light of the lamp that still glowed hard-slanted against the upper deck.
'Do I understand,' she exclaimed in a low voice, painful to hear with the tremulous gasps that shook it, 'that we are to remain in this condition until—until——' She stopped, then added, 'but until when? We are stranded and hidden and must perish.'
'Listen to me,' said I, 'for this is our chance as I see it is as a sailor: suppose us beached for months as we now are—though who's to predict that?—for within twenty-four hours may come a gale out of another quarter that shall free us and drive us amongst the ice to our destruction—take it we are to be stranded here: I have read the ship's papers, know the contents of the hold, and promise you, though no chance of rescue should happen for a twelvemonth, nay, for a couple of years, help, when it comes, shall find us alive so far as life may be kept in us by food and drink and warmth.'
She buried her face: I think it nearly killed her to hear me talk of a twelvemonth or two years. Then, flashing upon me as it were with a sudden dropping of her hands and the stare of her desperate grief and horror, she cried:
'Is there no hope beyond the waiting for the deliverance which may never happen?' and without stopping for an answer she went on: 'How are we to live even for a week in a hull we cannot move about on?'
'That's the very least of our troubles,' said I. 'Come, you have spirit—the heart of an Englishwoman beats in you. You must put some face of courage and faith upon this business. We are alive. Keep on thinking of that. Consider what we have come through. We might have been thrown upon the ice without this shelter.'
'We have stranded on an island, you say?'
'I think so.'
'What island?'
I answered her.
'Is there no harbour in it, no place where ships touch, no place where men are? If they came fishing down here for whales and seals there should be a port.'
I put my hand upon a life-line and walked to the captain's cabin. It was as dark as night there, for the heel of the hulk depressed the cabin windows to within arms' reach of the beach, as it looked. I lighted a bull's-eye, and, finding the chart I required, returned with it.
It was a chart of the discoveries made in these waters between 1819 and 1843. It outlined Graham Land down to sixty-eight degrees south, and a little more than sixty-eight degrees west, and submitted a shaded tracing of the South Shetlands; but I was very certain that our island was none of them. I put the chart on Miss Otway's knee and threw the lamplight upon it, and said, pointing to Coronation Island and then to Laurie Island:
'Which of them this is I can't tell you, but I should guess by our drift that it's the bigger of the two, and that our lodgment's here,' and I put my finger upon a bight named Palmer's Bay. 'Here's a mountain at back of it, you see,' said I, 'towering to a height of nigh four thousand five hundred feet; it was the blue shadow we saw in the air, and our drift was nigh hard straight for that.'
She put her face close to the chart, listening, meanwhile, greedily to me.
'But here are many English names,' said she—'Cape Dundas—Despair Rock—Saddle Island.' She read thus a little; then went on: 'Surely an island that has been named in this fashion is inhabited?'
'Well, it may be. I hope it is,' said I.
'Here are big islands,' she cried, pointing to the South Shetlands. 'Aren't there people upon them? And if so, couldn't we manage to get to the place where they're settled? It's not far,' she added, looking up at me.
'It's a long way,' said I, 'for all it looks but the span of a hand on this paper, and we have no boat.'
'People must have been in some such another dreadful situation as this before now,' she exclaimed. 'How did they manage?'
'We'll manage, depend on't', said I, with all the hearty cheerfulness I could summon. 'We'll write letters to the sea, telling our distress, and send them adrift in bottles. I'll fashion rafts out of some of the theatre stuff in the hold and send them afloat with the story of our condition mastheaded on them in cans. It's not for us to be hopeless. Wouldn't you rather be here than knocking about amongst the ice?'
'Oh yes,' she cried; 'but if we are locked up—hidden away?'
She started as if she would rise, and asked me to take her on deck that she might see where we were, but I thought proper to keep her below in the warmth and encourage her, and rouse her spirits by representations of our prospects of deliverance, before letting her view the situation of the hull; in truth I could not look at her and observe how delicate and fragile she was, and reflect on the depressing, heart-subduing influence of the terrors and experiences she had passed through, without fearing the effect of a sudden shock, such as might prove the sight of the savage wildness of the frowning, frozen cradle in which the hull lay as in a tomb.
I went about to get some breakfast. When I got on deck with a chopper to fill the kettle, I found that the mould of fresh-water ice I had split out of the scuttlebutt was gone. I had no mind to enter the hold; indeed, I had not strength enough then to break open the frozen hatch-covers; and water being wanted for a cup of hot coffee, I chipped at a spear of ice on the bulwark and found it sweet, and perhaps sweeter than the water we had been drinking. Why? Because nearly all those frozen heads and devices of barbs and spikes were frozen snow and mist. But never could we lack fresh water in this part of the world; the cliffs ahead and astern were fresh; we were beached in fresh-water ice. Even in that early time of my distress, whilst I sucked a little piece of ice off the bulwarks to learn its quality, I found myself lifting up my eyes with amazement at those giant heights, formed, as I knew, of the vapour of the air and the sleet of the cloud and the gale. It was like thinking of some vast, soft fog clinging to the face of the land and freezing there into precipitous iron-hard rocks.
Whilst making my way to the hatch with the ice, I heard a sudden great roar astern; a sharp tremble ran through the hull as though a mine had been sprung close alongside; the noise was exactly that of a broadside from a liner, every great gun discharged at once. Yet I saw no movement in the ice, nor heard any sound as of a fall. This put it into my head to fancy it might not be long before the great berg that was linked astern of us was sundered and on its way to join the rest of the mighty fleet, every one of which had had a like berth and such a despatch as awaited this.
I clawed my way to the side and looked over. The beach that held the berg to the main was perhaps a quarter of a mile long; I could not be sure; it went out of sight in a slope on the port hand. But, in comparison with the mighty bulk it yoked to the island, it was a slender tie indeed, to be snapped in any moment of storm as you'd break a clay pipe-stem. I peered down, wondering if the severance happened whether we should go with the berg or be left a-dry under the cliff as we now lay; but it was a hopeless and therefore a silly speculation; though all the same I prayed heartily whilst I stood staring about me that the berg would go, and speedily, whether it took us or left us, since, whilst we lay hidden by it, there was not the remotest chance, that I could imagine, of our being rescued.