tongue in the excitement of the moment.

"The ice is melting and discharging in Niagara Falls upon the whaler's
deck!" I cried, after listening a moment to the noise of a downpour
that rang through the cabin in a hollow thunder.

We rushed on deck. A furious squall was blowing, but the air was
becalmed where the vessel lay by the high cliffs of ice, and the rain
of the squall fell almost up and down in a very sheet of water,
intermingled with hailstones as big as the eggs of a thrush. The whole
scene of the ocean was a swirling, revolving smother, as though the
sky was full of steam, and the screech of the wind, as it fled off the
edge of the dead white heights which sheltered us, pierced the ear
like the whistlings of a thousand locomotives.

There was nothing to be seen of the schooner: but _that_ was trifling
for the moment compared to this: _there was nothing to be seen of the
boat_! The furious discharge of the squall would increase her weight
by half filling her with water; the slashing wet of the rain would
also render the icy slope up which we had hauled her as slippery as a
sheet for skaters; a single shock or blast of wind might suffice to
start her. Be this as it will, she had launched herself--she was gone!
We strained our sight, but no faintest blotch of shadow could we
distinguish amid the white water rushing smoothly off from the base of
the berg, and streaming into the pallid shadow of the squall where you
saw the sea clear of the ice beginning to work with true Atlantic
spite.

"Crate Cott!" cried Sweers, "what's to be done? There was no
appearance of a squall when we landed here. It drove up abaft this
berg, and it may have been hidden from the schooner herself by the
ice."

We crouched in the companion-way for shelter, not doubting that the
squall would speedily pass, and that the schooner, which we naturally
supposed lay close to the berg hove-to, would, the instant the weather
cleared, send a boat to take us off. But the squall, instead of
abating, gradually rose into half a gale of wind--a wet dark gale that
shrouded the sea with flying spume and rain to within a musket-shot of
the iceberg, whilst the sky was no more than a weeping, pouring shadow
coming and going as it were with a lightening and darkening of it by
masses of headlong torn vapour. Some of the ragged pinnacles of the
cliffs of ice seemed to pierce that wild dark, flying sky of storm as
it swept before the gale close down over