quite as high, and consequently were
more easily agitated. While the whole panorama was bowing and rocking,
pinnacles, arches, walls and all, seeming about to totter from their
bases, there came a wave sweeping down the passage that lifted them high
in the air, some fifty feet at least, and bore them along like pieces of
cork, fully a hundred yards. Other waves succeeded, though of less height
and force; when, gradually, the water regained its former and more natural
movement, and subsided.

"This has been an earthquake!" exclaimed Daggett. "That volcano has been
pent up, and the gas is stirring up the rocks beneath the sea."

"No, sir," answered Stimson, from the forecastle of his own schooner,
"it's not that, Captain Daggett. One of them bergs has turned over, like
a whale wallowing, and it has set all the others a-rocking."

This was the true explanation; one that did not occur to the less
experienced sealers. It is a danger, however, of no rare occurrence in the
ice, and one that ever needs to be looked to. The bergs, when they first
break loose from their native moorings, which is done by the agency of
frosts, as well as by the action of the seasons in the warm months, are
usually tabular, and of regular outlines; but this shape is soon lost by
the action of the waves on ice of very different degrees of consistency;
some being composed of frozen snow; some of the moisture precipitated from
the atmosphere in the shape of fogs; and some of pure frozen water. The
first melts soonest; and a berg that drifts for any length of time with
one particular face exposed to the sun's rays, soon loses its equilibrium,
and is canted with an inclination to the horizon. Finally, the centre of
gravity gets outside of the base, when the still monstrous mass rolls over
in the ocean, coming literally bottom upwards. There are all degrees and
varieties of these ice-slips, if one may so term them, and they bring in
their train the many different commotions that such accidents would
naturally produce. That which had just alarmed and astonished our
navigators was of the following character. A mass of ice that was about a
quarter of a mile in length, and of fully half that breadth, which floated
quite two hundred feet above the surface of the water, and twice that
thickness beneath it, was the cause of the disturbance. It had preserved
its outlines unusually well, and stood upright to the last moment; though,
owing to numerous strata of sn