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Medbourne was involved in a calculation of dollars and cents with which was strangely intermingled a project for supplying the East Indies with ice by harnessing a team of whales to the polar icebergs. As for the widow Wycherly, she stood before the mirror courtesying and simpering to her own image and greeting it as the friend whom she loved better than all the world besides.
The full moon shone with extraordinary brilliancy in the clearest sky; the stars were singularly bright; from the top of the iceberg the view stretched over an immense plain, bristling with icebergs; they were of all sizes and shapes, and made the field look like a vast cemetery, in which twenty generations slept the sleep of death.
As icebergs are known to be sometimes loaded with earth and stones, and have even carried brushwood, bones, and the nest of a land-bird, I can hardly doubt that they must occasionally have transported seeds from one part to another of the arctic and antarctic regions, as suggested by Lyell; and during the Glacial period from one part of the now temperate regions to another.
Then came the long gray twilight of the North, and at last the stars, and night, and darkness, with the icebergs, white, spectral, and coldly majestic, rising in silhouette against the distant sky, and the throbbing, restless sea, somber and black, around them. The two or three hours of the midsummer Labrador night were long hours for Bobby and Jimmy the longest hours they had ever experienced.
The winds that whistle round the icebergs and rush among the hummocks on the frozen sea speak to me sometimes; the crashing ice-cliffs that thunder down the glens speak to me; the noisy rivulets, the rising sun and moon and winking stars all speak to me, though it is difficult to understand what they say; but no familiar spirit ever speaks to me."
As they advanced, not only large hummocks, but vast icebergs became numerous, among which they were frequently enveloped, and many a circuit had to be made to avoid them. The day after the captain's death it began to snow heavily. The sledges were as usual ahead, still Andrew and his party managed to proceed with the boat.
Them white bears, they was so hungry, that they stood there with the water jist runnin' out of their chops in a perfect stream." "Oh, dear, dear," said Mara, with wide round eyes, "what will Moses do if they get on the icebergs?" "Yes," said Mrs. Kittridge, looking solemnly at the child through the black bows of her spectacles, "we can truly say:
Icebergs do even now carry off such masses from the polar coasts, which, falling when the retaining ice melts, must take up situations at the bottom of the sea analogous to those in which we find the erratic blocks of the present day.
We can well enter into the disappointment of those who expected to have found the long-talked-of open Polar Sea, instead of which ice, evidently of great age and thickness, the accumulation, it might be, of centuries, and resembling rather low floating icebergs massed together, than the ordinary appearance of salt-water.
To the eastward of the icebergs they could see with their glasses great patches of open water, and this would have prevented the making of a canal around the icebergs, for it would have been impossible to survey the route on sledges or to lay the line of bombs.
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