I had suspected from the echo of its remote
roaring in the north. It ran steadily out of the north-east. This was
miserable to see, for the line of its running was directly my course,
and if I committed myself to it in that little boat, the impulse of the
long and swinging folds could not but set me steadily southwards, unless
a breeze sprang up in that quarter to blow me towards the sun. There was
a small current of air stirring, a mere trickle of wind from the
north-west.

I made up my mind to climb as high as I could, taking the oar with me to
serve as a pole, that I might view the ice and the ocean round about and
form a judgment of the weather by the aspect of the sky, of which only
the western part was visible from my low strand. But first I must break
my fast. I remember bitterly lamenting the lack of means to make a fire,
that I might obtain a warm meal and a hot drink and dry my gloves, coat,
and breeches, to which the damp of the salt clung tenaciously. Had this
ice been land, though the most desolate, gloomy, repulsive spot in the
world, I had surely found something that would burn.

I sat in the boat to eat, and whilst thus occupied pondered over this
great field of ice, and wondered how so mighty a berg should travel in
such compacted bulk so far north--that is, so far north from the seat of
its creation. Now leisurely and curiously observing it, it seemed to me
that the north part of it, from much about the spot where my boat lay,
was formed of a chain of icebergs knitted one to another in a
consolidated range of irregular low steeps. The beautiful appearances of
spires, towers, and the like seemed as if they had been formed by an
upheaval, as of an earthquake, of splinters and bodies of the frozen
stuff; for, so far as it was possible for me to see from the low shore,
wherever these radiant and lovely figures were assembled I noticed great
rents, spacious chasms, narrow and tortuous ravines. Certain
appearances, however, caused me to suspect that this island was steadily
decaying, and that, large as it still was, it had been many times vaster
when it broke away from the continent about the Pole. Naturally, as it
progressed northwards it would dissolve, and the cracking and thunderous
noises I had heard in the night, sounds very audible now when I gave
them my attention--sometimes a hollow distant rumbling as of some great
body dislodged and set rolling far off, sometimes an inwards roaring
crack or blast