they might find
themselves stepping into Sedna's country side by side with all sorts of
wild Things, the flush of excitement still on them. When they left the
hut after the gale, the noise on the horizon was steadily growing, and
the tough ice moaned and buzzed all round them.

"It is still waiting," said Kotuko.

On the top of a hummock sat or crouched the eight-legged Thing that they
had seen three days before--and it howled horribly.

"Let us follow," said the girl. "It may know some way that does not lead
to Sedna"; but she reeled from weakness as she took the pulling-rope.
The Thing moved off slowly and clumsily across the ridges, heading
always toward the westward and the land, and they followed, while the
growling thunder at the edge of the floe rolled nearer and nearer. The
floe's lip was split and cracked in every direction for three or four
miles inland, and great pans of ten-foot-thick ice, from a few yards
to twenty acres square, were jolting and ducking and surging into one
another, and into the yet unbroken floe, as the heavy swell took and
shook and spouted between them. This battering-ram ice was, so to speak,
the first army that the sea was flinging against the floe. The incessant
crash and jar of these cakes almost drowned the ripping sound of sheets
of pack-ice driven bodily under the floe as cards are hastily pushed
under a tablecloth. Where the water was shallow these sheets would be
piled one atop of the other till the bottommost touched mud fifty feet
down, and the discoloured sea banked behind the muddy ice till the
increasing pressure drove all forward again. In addition to the floe and
the pack-ice, the gale and the currents were bringing down true bergs,
sailing mountains of ice, snapped off from the Greenland side of the
water or the north shore of Melville Bay. They pounded in solemnly,
the waves breaking white round them, and advanced on the floe like an
old-time fleet under full sail. A berg that seemed ready to carry the
world before it would ground helplessly in deep water, reel over, and
wallow in a lather of foam and mud and flying frozen spray, while a much
smaller and lower one would rip and ride into the flat floe, flinging
tons of ice on either side, and cutting a track half a mile long before
it was stopped. Some fell like swords, shearing a raw-edged canal;
and others splintered into a shower of blocks, weighing scores of tons
apiece, that whirled and skirted among the hummocks