United States or Lesotho ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Not more than half a mile distant towered an immense iceberg, its topmost pinnacles glowing in the bright morning sun. Other bergs floated to the southward, while to both east and west could be seen long floes of rugged ice. The yacht was trying to beat to the northward by making short tacks through the ice-floes, but, as Bob could see, she made but little way.
In tightening the cables, we found it to have the effect of bringing the bergs in towards the shore, still further contracting our narrow basin; but anything was better than suffering them to go adrift.
"Is there any danger, Buzzby?" inquired Fred, as the sturdy sailor stood looking at the larger berg, with an ice-pole in his hands. "Danger? ay, that there is, lad, more nor's agreeable, d'ye see. Here we are without a breath o' wind to get us on, right between two bergs as could crack us like a walnut.
Yesterday Wilson, Crean, P.O. Evans, and I donned our sledging kit and camped by the bergs for the benefit of Ponting and his cinematograph; he got a series of films which should be about the most interesting of all his collection. I imagine nothing will take so well as these scenes of camp life. On our return we found Meares had returned; he and the dogs well.
The magnificent mountains around the widespread tributaries of the glacier; the great, gently undulating, prairie-like expanse of the main trunk, bluish on the east, pure white on the west and north; its trains of moraines in magnificent curving lines and many colors black, gray, red, and brown; the stormy, cataract-like, crevassed sections; the hundred fountains; the lofty, pure white Fairweather Range; the thunder of the plunging bergs; the fleet of bergs sailing tranquilly in the inlet formed a glowing picture of nature's beauty and power.
One floe of bay-ice had black earth upon it, apparently basaltic in origin, and there was a large berg with a broad band of yellowish brown right through it. The stain may have been volcanic dust. Many of the bergs had quaint shapes. There was one that exactly resembled a large two-funnel liner, complete in silhouette except for smoke.
I saw bergs on the edge of the main glacier a mile back from here which seem to have been left by the draining of a pool in a sunken hollow. A circling rim of driftwood, back twenty rods on the glacier, marks the edge of the lakelet shore where the bergs lie scattered and stranded. It is now half past ten o'clock and getting dusk as I sit by my little fossil-wood fire writing these notes.
All on deck stood anxiously waiting his report. The berg appeared on the quarter, gradually becoming less and less distinct, till what seemed like a thin white mist alone was seen, which soon melted away altogether in the thick darkness. Still all well knew that other bergs might be in the neighbourhood, and a similar danger might have to be encountered.
Sixteen hours a day sometimes I stood sentinel at that wheel, overlooking the varied monotony of the ice-sea, till my knees would give, and I wondered why a wheel at which one might sit was not contrived, rather delicate steering being often required among the floes and bergs.
I was growing anxious to reach land on account of the dogs, which had not been able to get exercise for four weeks, and were becoming run down. We passed at least two hundred bergs during the day, and we noticed also large masses of hummocky bay-ice and ice-foot.
Word Of The Day