CHAPTER VIII.

NIX ET NOX.

The characteristic of the snowstorm is its blackness. Nature's habitual
aspect during a storm, the earth or sea black and the sky pale, is
reversed; the sky is black, the ocean white, foam below, darkness
above; a horizon walled in with smoke; a zenith roofed with crape. The
tempest resembles a cathedral hung with mourning, but no light in that
cathedral: no phantom lights on the crests of the waves, no spark, no
phosphorescence, naught but a huge shadow. The polar cyclone differs
from the tropical cyclone, inasmuch as the one sets fire to every light,
and the other extinguishes them all. The world is suddenly converted
into the arched vault of a cave. Out of the night falls a dust of pale
spots, which hesitate between sky and sea. These spots, which are flakes
of snow, slip, wander, and flow. It is like the tears of a winding-sheet
putting themselves into lifelike motion. A mad wind mingles with this
dissemination. Blackness crumbling into whiteness, the furious into the
obscure, all the tumult of which the sepulchre is capable, a whirlwind
under a catafalque--such is the snowstorm. Underneath trembles the
ocean, forming and re-forming over portentous unknown depths.

In the polar wind, which is electrical, the flakes turn suddenly into
hailstones, and the air becomes filled with projectiles; the water
crackles, shot with grape.

No thunderstrokes: the lightning of boreal storms is silent. What is
sometimes said of the cat, "it swears," may be applied to this
lightning. It is a menace proceeding from a mouth half open and
strangely inexorable. The snowstorm is a storm blind and dumb; when it
has passed, the ships also are often blind and the sailors dumb.

To escape from such an abyss is difficult.

It would be wrong, however, to believe shipwreck to be absolutely
inevitable. The Danish fishermen of Disco and the Balesin; the seekers
of black whales; Hearn steering towards Behring Strait, to discover the
mouth of Coppermine River; Hudson, Mackenzie, Vancouver, Ross, Dumont
D'Urville, all underwent at the Pole itself the wildest hurricanes, and
escaped out of them.

It was into this description of tempest that the hooker had entered,
triumphant and in full sail--frenzy against frenzy. When Montgomery,
escaping from Rouen, threw his galley, with all the force of its oars,
against the chain barring the Seine at La Bouille, he showed similar
effrontery.

The _Matutina_ sailed o