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"We are blocked up then?" "Yes." Thus around the Nautilus, above and below, was an impenetrable wall of ice. We were prisoners to the iceberg. I watched the Captain. His countenance had resumed its habitual imperturbability. "Gentlemen," he said calmly, "there are two ways of dying in the circumstances in which we are placed."
An encounter with an iceberg will bring the common responsibilities and dangers to the notice of the most inveterate individualist, but even while the ship moves uneventfully forward, he, perforce, shares the feeling of oneness.
Three years before the Titanic had been sunk on a clear and quiet night, because a great iceberg formed in the frozen north had floated silently down to where, crossing the ship's course in mid-Atlantic, it struck her the slanting blow that sent her to the bottom.
She had seated herself upon one of the largest, and let the wind play with her long hair, and she remarked that all the ships sailed by rapidly, and steered as far away as they could from the iceberg, as if they were afraid of it.
Hence the danger of ships, in certain circumstances, venturing to anchor to them. Nevertheless this is a common practice sometimes a necessity among discovery ships and whalers. It is a convenient practice too; for many a vessel has been saved from absolute destruction by getting under the lee of a good sound iceberg, where she has lain as safely, for the time being, as if in a harbour.
Not a vestige of that dense mass of ice which, three months previously, had borne them over lake and river, was now to be seen. The sun danced joyously and sportively on the golden wave, and where recently towered the rugged surface of the tiny iceberg, the still, calm, unbroken level of the mirroring lake was only visible.
"The light got clear; and there, to our horror, just where we wanted the dear old brig to go and she wouldn't go, like a sensible creature, although we cursed her for not obeying the helm was an enormous iceberg rising out of the depths of the ocean, and towering above the masts of the poor Jane, which I feel loth to call `cranky' any longer as high almost as the eyes could see, like the cliffs at Dover, only a hundred yards higher, without exaggeration!
Amos Green looked about him with startled eyes. "I cannot understand it," said he. "I could have sworn By the eternal, listen to that!" The clear call of a military bugle rang out in the morning air. With a cry of amazement they all three craned forward and peered over the edge. A large ship was lying under the very shadow of the iceberg.
For a moment the castaways could almost have believed that it was his wraith, were wraiths ever seen in so homely an attitude, but the tones of his voice very soon showed that it was indeed he, and in no very Christian temper either. "Friend Tomlinson," said he, "when I tell you to row for an iceberg I mean you to row right away there, d'ye see, and not to go philandering about over the ocean.
And no man answered, for they were all as keen as me for to go and help our mates; and we thought as we could come back to our dead fish, as had a boat for a buoy, once we had helped our mates. So off we rowed, every man Jack on us, out o' the black shadow o' th' iceberg, as looked as steady as th' pole-star.