.

IV. ST. MAEL'S NAVIGATION ON THE OCEAN OF ICE

The Devil, having tucked his clothes up to his arm-pits, dragged the
trough on the sand, and fitted the rigging in less than an hour.

As soon as the holy Mael had embarked, the vessel, with all its sails
set, cleft through the waters with such speed that the coast was almost
immediately out of sight. The old man steered to the south so as to
double the Land's End, but an irresistible current carried him to the
south-west. He went along the southern coast of Ireland and turned
sharply towards the north. In the evening the wind freshened. In vain
did Mael attempt to furl the sail. The vessel flew distractedly towards
the fabulous seas.

By the light of the moon the immodest sirens of the North came around
him with their hempen-coloured hair, raising their white throats and
their rose-tinted limbs out of the sea; and beating the water into foam
with their emerald tails, they sang in cadence:

Whither go'st thou, gentle Mael,
In thy trough distracted?
All distended is thy sail
Like the breast of Juno
When from it gushed the Milky Way.

For a moment their harmonious laughter followed him beneath the stars,
but the vessel fled on, a hundred times more swiftly than the red ship
of a Viking. And the petrels, surprised in their flight, clung with
their feet to the hair of the holy man.

Soon a tempest arose full of darkness and groanings, and the trough,
driven by a furious wind, flew like a sea-mew through the mist and the
surge.

After a night of three times twenty-four hours the darkness was suddenly
rent and the holy man discovered on the horizon a shore more dazzling
than diamond. The coast rapidly grew larger, and soon by the glacial
light of a torpid and sunken sun, Mael saw, rising above the waves,
the silent streets of a white city, which, vaster than Thebes with its
hundred gates, extended as far as the eye could see the ruins of its
forum built of snow, its palaces of frost, its crystal arches, and its
iridescent obelisks.

The ocean was covered with floating ice-bergs around which swam men of
the sea of a wild yet gentle appearance. And Leviathan passed by hurling
a column of water up to the clouds.

Moreover, on a block of ice which floated at the same rate as the stone
trough there was seated a white bear holding her little one in her arms,
and Mael heard her murmuring in a low voice this verse of Virgil, Incipe
parve p