United States or United Kingdom ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He knew that life and death were in the balance at any rate; but he also knew that to remain inactive on that iceberg would remove life out of the balance altogether. He therefore threw all his energy of soul and body into that rush, and launched himself against the broad back of the bear. It was an awful shock.
A ship in the whale trade, driven out of her course, fell in with a wrecked and dismantled vessel, lost in the ice. Let the last sentences of the captain's report tell the story. "The wreck was drifting along a channel of open water, when we first saw it. Before long, it was brought up by an iceberg. I got into my boat with some of my sailors, and we rowed to the vessel.
An iceberg before me could not more have chilled me; nor could the cold of an iceberg have been more purely physical. I feel convinced that it was not the cold caused by fear. As I continued to gaze; I thought but this I cannot say with precision that I distinguished two eyes looking down on me from the height.
In approaching Hudson's straits, we first saw one of those beautiful features in the scenery of the North, an Iceberg, which being driven with vast masses of ice off Cape Farewell, South Greenland, are soon destroyed by means of the solar heat, and tempestuous force of the sea.
A top-gallant-sail, on which were painted several blue cracks, and some strong white lights did duty for an iceberg, and filled up the whole back of the scene. In front of this, in the centre of the stage, on an extemporized hummock, sat Peter Grim, as the Giant Blunderbore.
Receiving little satisfaction there, he hurried to the home of his employer, Mr. Williams. The magnate, red-faced and angry, returned with him to the station. Captain Sol received them blandly. Issy, who heard the interview which followed, declared that the depot master was so cool that "an iceberg was a bonfire 'longside of him."
There had been a tension in the negro's voice that had made everyone stop talking. The soldiers looked at him curiously. "How de Titanic ran in dat cole iceberg, How de Titanic ran in dat cole iceberg Sailin' on de sea." His voice was confidential and soft, and the guitar strummed to the same sobbing rag-time. Verse after verse the voice grew louder and the strumming faster.
The shock of the shipwreck and the night spent in their bleak refuge upon the iceberg had been too much for his years and strength. Since they had been picked up he had lain amid the scurvy-stricken soldiers with hardly a sign of life save for his thin breathing and the twitching of his scraggy throat.
The fancy of the ladies had been permitted to decorate and arrange these types of the animal world. The tiger glared with glass eyes from amidst artificial reeds and herbage, as from his native jungle; the grisly white bear peered from a mimic iceberg.
"Well," said the old gentleman, quite pleased at being asked for information on the subject, and evidently wishing to convert me to his own practical way of thinking in opposition to Arctic fiction-mongers, "they may sometimes be seen of a hundred and fifty feet high, occasionally reaching to a couple of hundred, while sometimes I've seen an iceberg that towered up more than double that height; but the majority of them do not exceed a hundred feet at most.
Word Of The Day