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The handle of our heaviest axe was cracked, and as Charley declared that there was no firewood to be had in the big ice-mountain bay, we would have to load the canoe with a store for cooking at an island out in the Strait a few miles from the village. We were therefore anxious to buy or trade for a good sound axe in exchange for our broken one. Good axes are rare in rocky Alaska.
His recent interview with the Doctor, certain remarks that had been dropped in his hearing, but above all an unaccountable impression upon his spirits, all combined to fill his mind with a foreboding conviction that he was very near some overshadowing danger. It was as the chill of the ice-mountain towards which the ship is steering under full sail.
I am so doubtful of the result, that I would willingly give up my place to anyone who wanted it.” Perhaps the boatswain was right. But in my own mind, when I asked that the boat might be utilized, it was only for the purpose of reconnoitring the iceberg. We finally decided to arrange everything with a view to wintering out, even were our ice-mountain again to drift.
And he turned his face again towards Rhineland; and the magic shoes bore him aloft, and carried him in a moment back to the ice-mountain and the gorge and the infant river, which he had so lately left. The salmon still rested in his place, and had not moved during Loki's short absence. Loki unfolded the net, and cast it into the stream.
Now she rose to the summit of a dark green mountainous billow, with its crest all leaping, foaming, and hissing; then she glided rapidly down its side, as if it had been an ice-mountain, into the dark valley below, again to rise up more slowly to the top of another sea, suddenly to find herself once more in the deep trough, with a huge curling wave reaching almost to her tops, threatening to break over her.
"Why, it seems as if an earthquake were taking place," said Willy. At that moment they heard Shafto shouting loudly to them. "Not a moment to be lost," cried the doctor. "On, boys, for your lives! Here, take my hand, Dicey, I'll not leave you behind." The huge ice-mountain became more and more agitated as they moved on.
"Ice-mountain hi yu kumtux hide," glaciers know how to hide extremely well, said Tyeen, as he rested for a moment after rounding a huge granite shoulder of the wall whence we expected to gain a view of the extreme head of the fiord.
His ears were filled with a dull and steady roar, like the echoes of distant thunder, broken now and then when an ice-mountain split asunder with a report like that of a thirteen-inch gun. There were curious wailings, strange screeching sounds, and heartbreaking moanings in the air. Two days before MacVeigh had heard the roar of the ice ten miles inland, where he had gone for caribou.
The afternoon was wearing away as we pushed on and on through the drifting bergs without our having obtained a single glimpse of the great glacier. A Sum Dum seal-hunter, whom we met groping his way deftly through the ice in a very small, unsplitable cottonwood canoe, told us that the ice-mountain was yet fifteen miles away.
Then the war between the ice and the elements will begin afresh, until the once stately ice-mountain will become the `bergy bit, as whalers call the slowly-lessening mass of crumbling, spongy ice, until it finally disappears in the waters; but only to rise again in the form of vapour, which the cold of the north will convert into snow, the parent of that inland ice about the polar regions which forms the source of subsequent icebergs afresh the process being always going on, never ending!"
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