t happen to be between them. And as for the barque--the
way in which her bows were burying themselves in the hissing wave that
foamed and surged about her cutwater, and the terrified looks of her
crew as they glanced, now aloft at the formidable bergs, and now at the
straining hawser--from which they stood warily aloof lest it should
part, and in so doing inflict upon some of them a deadly injury--told
the baronet that he must not increase by a single ounce the strain upon
the rope, lest something should give way on board the whaler and leave
her there helpless in the very grip of those awful floating mountains of
ice.

It was a race between the bergs and the barque; and Mildmay, standing
there by the after rail, told himself, as he breathlessly watched the
progress of events, that the bergs would win. The contiguous sides of
these monsters were slightly concave in shape; and whilst the whaler,
still some dozen yards or so within the passage had a foot or two of
clear water on either side of her, the projecting extremities of the
bergs had neared each other to within a distance of twenty feet, or some
five feet less than the breadth of the imprisoned ship.

Suddenly a tremendous crash was heard, and the party on board the
_Flying Fish_ looked to see the unfortunate barque collapse and crumple
into a shapeless mass of splintered wood before their eyes. But, to
their inexpressible astonishment, nothing of the sort occurred. There
was a reverberating sound as of muffled thunder, which echoed and re-
echoed in the confined space between the two bergs; a series of
tremendous splashes just astern of the whaler; the bergs recoiled
violently from each other; the baronet, more by instinct than anything
else, threw the engine lever still further forward, and before anyone
had time even to draw a breath of relief, the apparently doomed vessel
was dragged, with a foaming surge heaped up round her bows as high as
the figurehead, out from the reopened portal and clear of all danger a
single instant before the two gigantic masses of ice again closed in
upon each other with a horrible grinding _crunch_ which must have been
audible for miles.

It was not until the barque had been dragged, almost bows under, some
fifty or sixty fathoms away from the still grinding and rasping bergs,
that her crew were able to realise the astounding fact of their safety,
but when they did so they sent up a wild cheer which was as distinct an
expres