Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 4, 2025
A scene made up of dangers by land and dangers by sea; of wide, lonely floes of ice, their white gleam darkening into the gloom of the mysterious distance as yet untrodden by human feet. Ned's pulses never failed to beat like hammers when such thought-pictures dangled themselves before his mind's vision.
The pressure was tremendous, and on every side floes heaped up their debris on each other, and pinnacles forced into collision were ground into common ruin.
"I have said that the pieces of ice now about us were called 'floes, or ice-fields; the whole together was called 'the pack. We were now in perfectly smooth water, for you will easily understand that the ice which we had passed broke the swell of the sea.
"What?" chorused the boys. "Why that creature off there on the ice flapping about, it seems to be in distress." "There is certainly something the matter with it," agreed Frank. What seemed to be a huge bird was struggling and flapping about on the floes at no great distance from them. "Other birds are attacking it!" cried Billy. It was so, indeed.
On that last day the 29th June I was about to encamp on a floe soon after midnight, when, happening to look toward the sun, my eye fell, far away south across the ocean of floes, upon something the masts of a ship.
He pulled himself together with a low laugh and faced the breaking seas of ice and the north. The gloom of night had drawn the horizon nearer. The rumble and thunder of crumbling floes came from out of a purple chaos that was growing blue-black in the distance. For several minutes he stood listening and looking into nothingness.
Hurley meanwhile descended to the floe and took some photographs of the ship in her unusual position. Dinner in the wardroom that evening was a curious affair. Most of the diners had to sit on the deck, their feet against battens and their plates on their knees. At 8 p.m. the floes opened, and within a few minutes the 'Endurance' was nearly upright again.
Before we could remove this obstruction by hauling it back out of the channel, the floes were again pressed together, wedging it firmly and immovably between them: the saws were immediately set to work, and used with great effect; but it was not till eleven o'clock that we succeeded, after seven hours' labour, in getting the Hecla into the lanes of clear water which opened more and more to the westward.
When, as on the Ohio, these fields sometimes have the area of several hundred acres, they often collide with the shores, especially where the stream makes a sharp bend. Urged by their momentum, these ice floes pack into the semblance of a dam, which may have a thickness of twenty, thirty, or even fifty feet.
It was a sort of river amid the floes, caused doubtless by some of the inexplicable currents, and was fully a quarter of a mile in width, straight as an air-line, and of considerable length; though how long could not be seen by moonlight. It led, moreover, directly down towards the bergs, then distant less than a mile.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking