e of old Abraham, I should to my last breath
remember the solemn and terrible magnificence of that picture of
lightning-coloured ice, the sulphur-tinctured shapes of the swollen
bodies of clouds bringing their dark electric mines together in a
huddle, the answering flash of the face of the deep to the lancing of
each spiral dazzling bolt, with the air as still as the atmosphere of a
cathedral for the thunder to roll its echoes through.

There was a second furious shower of hail, and when that was over I
looked forth, and observed that the storm was settling into the
north-east, whence I concluded that what draught there might be up there
sat in the south-west. Nor was I mistaken; for half an hour after the
first of the outburst, by which time the lightning played weak and at
long intervals low down, and the thunder had ceased, I felt a crawling
of air coming out of the south-west, which presently briskened into a
small steady blowing. But not for long. It freshened yet and yet; the
wrinkles crisped into whiteness on the black heavings; they grew into
small surges with sharp cubbish snarlings preludious of the lion's
voice; and by ten o'clock it was blowing in strong squalls, the seas
rising, and the clouds sailing swiftly in smoke-coloured rags under the
stars.

The posture of the ice inclined the schooner's starboard bow to the
billows; and in a very short time she was trembling in every bone to the
blows of the surges which rolled boiling over the ice there and struck
her, flinging dim clouds of spume in the air, which soon set the
scuppers gushing. My case was that of a stranded ship, with this
difference only, that a vessel ashore lies solid to the beating of the
waves, whereas the ice was buoyant, it rose and fell, sluggishly it is
true, and so somewhat mitigated the severity of the shocks of water.
But, spite of this, I was perfectly sure that unless the bed broke under
her or she slipt off it, she would be in pieces before the morning. It
was not in any hull put together by human hands to resist the pounding
of those seas. The weight of the mighty ocean along whose breast they
raced was in them, and though the wind was no more than a brisk gale,
each billow by its stature showed itself the child of a giantess. The
ice-bed was like a whirlpool with the leap and flash and play of the
froth upon it. The black air of the night was whitened by the storms of
foam-flakes which flew over the vessel. The roaring of the b