It no longer blew hard, but it was still a fresh breeze, spray-clouded in the frequent guns of it that shrieked in gusts over the bulwarks to the loftier lifts of the hull. But what my sight went to and remained fastened upon whilst, I own, my breath came and went quickly with the surprise of the magnificent, but to us the terrible, sight, was the scene of the southern quarter of the sea. There, stretching for miles and miles, was ice in bergs which to the naked sight looked to lie so close, the picture was that of a compacted coast of alabaster, broken with pinnacles and acclivities of a thousand shapes, curving in places as though in bays, the whole on either hand dying out in films of white, whilst over the bows and over the stern, too, every time we rose to the height of a sea I saw ice, plentiful as the breasts of the canvas of a vast fleet; and through the southern sky low down ran a long glinting line or gleam as though a continent of ice was reflected in its face; it was like the pearly radiance that hovers just off the edges of sails when lightly swelling in the tropics against a soft blue sky. I glanced at Miss Otway: she was staring at the sight with large nostrils and a gaze of terror under the little frown that the strain of her gaze had knitted her brows into. 'That is ice,' she cried. 'Ay, miles of it' said I. 'But is there nothing good for us amidst that prodigious huddle of sail-like stuff?' I took the telescope out of the companion and knelt with it to steady the tubes, and slowly and carefully swept the whole of that wonderful range, from film to film blue in the air. The sun's rosy light was full upon it; only the brush of an artist could show you what I saw as the surge ran me into a clear view of the horizon. It looked like a hundred cities of marble and alabaster, all of them going to pieces. It was no compact coast. There were many wide gaps, titanic streets fit for the tread of such ocean giant-spirits as would inhabit those colossal structures of crystal. The nearest point seemed about ten miles distant. All was clear sea between, and northwards I saw no ice. Miss Otway stood beside me holding by a belaying pin in the rail. Again and again she would say: 'Do you see any signs of a ship? Is not that the canvas of a ship--_there_, just where your telescope now points?' I saw no ship, but I looked with impassioned intentness till my eyeball seemed to melt dim through the lens under the brass it was pressed against, conceiving that in so vast an arm of ice some vessel might lie embayed. CHAPTER XVI THE AURORA AUSTRALIS Whilst slowly sweeping the ice with the glass, I saw, or seemed to see, when the lenses pointed a little to the eastward of south, a blue shadow of land in the air. I took my eye away from the telescope and then the shadow was gone: I looked again through the glass and there it was, a dim, scarcely distinguishable liquid dye whitening as it climbed till it melted in the azure.