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No longer were the blocks piled on the island pushed forward by the tremendous pressure of the ice-field. The torrent was stayed and they could approach the island with safety. As soon as they were assured that this was so the canoe was brought close to the rocks.
"Now," says D'Urville, "the horizon was so light that we could trace all the irregularities of Louis Philippe's Land. From Mount Bransfield to the south it is lofty, and of fairly uniform surface, resembling a vast, unbroken ice-field.
The moon shone on it, and it looked like a great shimmering ice-field, with the heads of the distant tors as rocks borne upon its surface. Holmes's face was turned towards it, and he muttered impatiently as he watched its sluggish drift. "It's moving towards us, Watson." "Is that serious?" "Very serious, indeed the one thing upon earth which could have disarranged my plans.
"But you and your companion, Johnson," said the doctor, "how did you manage to reach land?" "Oh! we stayed twenty-four hours more on the block of ice, without food or firing; but at last we met with an ice-field; we jumped on to it, and with the help of an oar we fastened ourselves to an iceberg that we could guide like a raft, and we got to land, but without our brave officer."
There were many tracks close to the cabin where they themselves, as well as the girl, had moved to and fro. Their roving glances went farther afield. Plain as the swirling waters in the wake of a boat stretched the tracks of a snowshoer across the lower end of the lake. They pushed across to examine them closer, following them a dozen yards to the edge of the ice-field.
"I am of your opinion, Johnson, but the difficulty will be to get as far as Melville Bay. See how the icebergs encircle us from every point! They scarcely leave a passage for the Forward. Just examine that immense plain over there." "The whalers call that in our language an ice-field, that is to say a continued surface of ice the limits of which cannot be perceived."
From all along the outer fringes of the flats came a hoarse, desolate roar; and in the steady light the edges of the ice-field began to turn and flash, the strange motion creeping gradually inland toward that impassive bulwark of the dyke. Had it been daylight, the chaotic ice-field would have shown small beauty, every wave-beaten floe being soiled and streaked with rust-coloured Tantramar mud.
In ice-shooting, every color but pure white is totally inadmissible; for the faintest shade of any other color shows black and prominent against the spotless background of glittering ice-field and snow-covered cliffs.
At last, on the 15th of September, about three o'clock in the afternoon, the ice-field, stopped, probably, by collision with another field, gave a violent shake to the brig, and stood still. Hatteras found himself out of sight of land in latitude 78 degrees 15 minutes and longitude 95 degrees 35 minutes in the midst of the unknown sea, where geographers have placed the Frozen Pole.
They learnt from them that navigation was completely free this year round the whole of Iceland; that the ice-field resting on Jan Mayen Island, and surrounding it to a distance of about twenty leagues, extended down the south-west along the coast of Greenland, but without blocking up the channel which separates that coast from that of Iceland.
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