swell out of the south-east. The sky was full of
clouds, with a stooping appearance in the hang of them that reminded you
of the belly of a hammock; they were of a sallow brown, very uncommon;
some of them round about sipped the sea-line, and their shadows,
obliterating those parts of the cincture which they overhung, broke the
continuity of the horizon as though there were valleys in the ocean
there. A good part of our bed of ice was gone, at least a fourth of it;
but the schooner still lay as strongly fixed as before. I had come to
the deck half expecting to find her afloat from the regular manner of
her heaving, and was bitterly disappointed to discover her rooted as
strongly as ever in the ice, though the irritation softened when I
noticed how the bed had diminished. The mass with the ship upon it rose
and sank with the sluggish squatting motion of a water-logged vessel. It
was an odd sensation to my legs after their long rest from such
exercise. The heaving satisfied me that the base of the bed did not go
deep, but at the same time it was all too solid for me, I could not
doubt, for had the sheet been as thin as I had hoped it, it must have
given under the weight of the schooner and released her.

The island lay a league distant on the larboard beam, and looked a
wondrous vast field of ice going into the south, and it stared very
ghastly upon the dark green sea out of the clouds whose gloom sank
behind it. I could not observe that we had drifted anything to the
north, whilst our set to the westwards had been steady though
snail-like. The sea in the north and north-west swarmed with bergs, like
great snowdrops on the green undulating fields of the deep. Now and
again the swell, in which fragments of ice floated with the gleam of
crystal in liquid glass, would be too quick for our dull rise and
overflow the bed, brimming to the channels with much noise of foam and
pouring waters, but the interposition of the ice took half its weight
out of it, and it never did more than send a tremble through the vessel.

What to make of the weather I knew not. Certainly, of all the caprices
of this huge cold sea, its calms are the shortest lived, but this
knowledge helped me to no other. The clouds did not stir. In the
north-east a beam of sunshine stood like a golden waterspout, its foot
in a little flood of glory. It stayed all the while I was on deck,
showing that the clouds had scarce any motion, and made the picture of
the se