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Chayne was standing too far back to see down beyond the edge, but he could hear François' ax clattering against the ice-walls, and the grating of his boots. Michel, who was kneeling at the edge of the chasm, held up his hand, and the men upon the rope ceased to haul. In a minute or two he lowered it. "Gently," he said, "gently," gazing downward with a queer absorption.
Ah, the breathless hush that followed! for amid the icy waste They a human shape discernèd, madly, as by demons chased, Up the crystal ledges climbing, pausing now where ice-walls screen From the blast, then upward springing o'er abyss and dread ravine, Until silence, Glittering silence, Reigned amid the icebergs' sheen.
It was a moment of great danger, for the bergs encroached on their narrow canal as they advanced, obliging them to brace the yards to clear the impending ice-walls, and they shaved the large berg so closely that the port-quarter boat would have been crushed if it had not been taken from the davits.
It was a moment of great danger, for the bergs encroached on their narrow canal as they advanced, obliging them to brace the yards to clear the impending ice-walls, and they shaved the large berg so closely that the port quarter-boat would have been crushed if it had not been taken from the davits.
After 30 many days cooped up between ice-walls and precipitous heights, Lenox caught his breath at the magnitude of the view outspread before him; an amphitheatre of 'the greater gods', ridge beyond ridge, peak beyond dazzling peak, stabbing the blue, the highest of them little lower than Everest's self: while across the rock-bound valley a host of glaciers, like primeval monsters, crept downward from the mountains that gave them birth.
No four-footed animals rove over it; no human beings inhabit it. Hundreds of thousands of square miles of pack-ice, glaciers, and ice-walls jealously guard it on all sides. On one side, for a distance of five hundred miles, extends a great ice barrier whose perpendicular ice-wall is from thirty to three hundred feet in height.
I placed ice-blocks in a circle, pouring boiling water between each two blocks to melt the points of contact, and in half an hour they had frozen into one solid lump. I and a friend proceeded like this till the ice-walls were about four feet high, spaces being left for the door and windows.
Do not look, sir!" Saying which, Conseil clapped his hands over his eyes. "But what is the matter, my boy?" "I am dazzled, blinded." My eyes turned involuntarily towards the glass, but I could not stand the fire which seemed to devour them. I understood what had happened. The Nautilus had put on full speed. All the quiet lustre of the ice-walls was at once changed into flashes of lightning.
He had been steadied across the narrow bridge with the rope, hauled up the ice-walls and let down again on the other side. But he had come through. He took some pride in the exploit as he gazed back from the top of the snow-slope across the tumult of ice to the rocks on which he had slipped. He had come through safely, and he was encouraged to go on.
The fragment of ice was already nearly crossed when the wind changed, and the motion of the waves in the offing began to be felt, causing the officers to agree in urging a retreat into the shelter of the ice-walls, for there was some danger if the wind freshened of the vessel being embayed against the ice and beaten to pieces by the waves and floating débris.
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