soon see; I suppose the unknown will
come as captain on board from the coast of Uppernawik or Melville
Bay, and will tell us at last where it is his good pleasure to conduct
the ship."

"I am of your opinion, Johnson, but the difficulty will be to get
as far as Melville Bay. See how the icebergs encircle us from every
point! They scarcely leave a passage for the _Forward_. Just examine
that immense plain over there."

"The whalers call that in our language an ice-field, that is to say
a continued surface of ice the limits of which cannot be perceived."

"And on that side, that broken field, those long pieces of ice more
or less joined at their edges?"

"That is a pack; if it was of a circular form we should call it a
patch; and, if the form was longer, a stream."

"And there, those floating icebergs?"

"Those are drift-ice; if they were a little higher they would be
icebergs or hills; their contact with vessels is dangerous, and must
be carefully avoided. Here, look over there: on that ice-field there
is a protuberance produced by the pressure of the icebergs; we call
that a hummock; if that protuberance was submerged to its base we
should call it a calf. It was very necessary to give names to all
those forms in order to recognise them."

"It is truly a marvellous spectacle!" exclaimed the doctor,
contemplating the wonders of the Boreal Seas; "there is a field for
the imagination in such pictures!"

"Yes," answered Johnson, "ice often takes fantastic shapes, and our
men are not behindhand in explaining them according to their own
notions."

"Isn't that assemblage of ice-blocks admirable? Doesn't it look like
a foreign town, an Eastern town, with its minarets and mosques under
the pale glare of the moon? Further on there is a long series of Gothic
vaults, reminding one of Henry the Seventh's chapel or the Houses
of Parliament."

"They would be houses and towns very dangerous to inhabit, and we
must not sail too close to them. Some of those minarets yonder totter
on their base, and the least of them would crush a vessel like the
_Forward_."

"And yet sailors dared to venture into these seas before they had
steam at their command! How ever could a sailing vessel be steered
amongst these moving rocks?"

"Nevertheless, it has been accomplished, Mr. Clawbonny. When the wind
became contrary--and that has happened to me more than once--we
quietly anchored to one of those blocks, and we drifted more or less
wit