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This leading continued for about half an hour; by that time they had reached Ljunger Point, where they left the ice and waded to shore. They were still terribly frightened, even though they were on firm land. They did not stop to look back at the lake where the waves were pitching the ice-floes faster and faster but ran on. When they had gone a short distance along the point, Osa paused suddenly.
There was no effort for comfort and Jake, who was tired and did not like the hard chairs, sat, smoking, on a box. Outside, shabby frame houses ran down hill to the angry green river where drifting ice-floes shocked. Dark woods rolled up the other bank and trails of mist crawled among the pines. Patches of snow checkered the rocks above; in the distance a white range glimmered against leaden cloud.
He considered a moment longer, and threw off his black soutane, having determined to take to the water, although it was truly a desperate chance, the current running like a mill-race with the ebbing tide, and, moreover, being choked with ice-floes. Ah, there was Blazer's bay, he must lose no time.
They were big ice-floes that had been thrown one upon another and were now sailing southward. They shone like silver in the morning sun, and now and then they showed as pink as though they had been strewed with roses. But high up among the whistling of the wind loud cries were heard, now like singing voices, now like pealing trumpets.
A dozen times in the course of the day Maria and her mother opened the window to feel the softness of the air, listen to the tinkle of water running from the last drifts on higher slopes, or hearken to the mighty roar telling that the exulting Peribonka was free, and hurrying to the lake a freight of ice-floes from the remote north.
Caius came up from the western shore, where he had been watching a distant ship that passed on the other side of the nearer ice-floes, and which said, by no other signal than that of her white sails, that winter was gone.
The gale continued for three days, the wind attaining a velocity of seventy miles an hour. The snowdrift was very thick and the temperature fell to -20° Fahr. The shore party took a gloomy view of the ship's chances of safety among the ice-floes of the Ross Sea under such conditions.
A few ice-floes drifted by us, occasionally peopled, as tourists throng a pleasure yacht, by penguins, and also by dusky seals, lying flat upon the white surfaces like enormous leeches. Above this strange flotilla we traced the incessant flight of petrels, pigeons, black puffins, divers, grebe, sterns, cormorants, and the sooty-black albatross of the high latitudes.
"By putting himself into such a position," said Martin, "that he will be able to predict, six, eight, ten days ahead, the weather of a vast part of the navigable and habitable world by establishing installations of wireless telegraphy as near as possible to the long ice-barrier about the Pole from which ice-floes and icebergs and blizzards come, so that we can say in ten minutes from the side of Mount Erebus to half the southern hemisphere, 'Look out.
When the water rose considerably above his knees, and ice-floes threatened to sweep him away, Mr Ravenshaw thought it was time for an elderly gentleman to retire. The others continued for some time longer securing the ropes and, with poles, turning aside the ice; but ere long they also were driven to the higher ground, and compelled to stand idly by and watch the work of destruction.
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