At last the starboard cabin windows, high in the broadside, showed of a pale steel grey; I went on my hands and feet to the steps and reached the deck. I stood a little while in the companion-way thunderstruck; I was confounded and could not credit my sight. The hull lay stranded in a very well of ice. Ahead and astern rose masses of cliffs to an altitude of four or five hundred feet. The vessel lay on a frozen beach; 'twas a sloping sweep of the stuff, apparently linking the iceberg astern to the ice over the bows. The bight or bay we had drifted into was ramparted by the iceberg which sank from a vast terrace to a point in an arm of natural breakwater like marble; but the ice ahead was fixed to the face of the land. After looking a little I spied the iron frown of dusky rocks perpendicular and smooth as though planed, showing amidst the snow. Past the hinder ice and beyond the giant limb of marble-like breakwater was the rolling ocean. It still blew hard, the seas raced angrily. Whatever of ice they smote they flashed upon; over the lower parts of the ice terrace the surge was bursting in lofty clouds, bright as light. The heave came round the point in a wide swell, which did not break in foam upon the beach where we lay, but swept silent, in a glass-green volume, along the slope, just as the foamless lift of the sea washes past the side of a ship; it broke only where it met with anything rugged, and quickly lost its weight in the curve, soundlessly recoiling from the base of the iceberg astern, though mightily troubling the surface of the water by conflict with the succeeding heave. The sky between the cliffs was wild with flying scud and rusty brown masses of vapour rushing southwards. The vessel lay close in to the land; she rested on her side at an angle of hard upon fifty degrees. On either hand was open sky, the picture of it to port showing as at the extremity of an immense ravine. Save but for sudden, quick shootings of little short-lived draughts and blasts, the calm and even the repose down here was as though we were in a well. The swell never swept nearer to us than twenty feet. I crept to the side and lay over, watching anxiously, and thus made sure of this after following the quiet sweep of at least twenty successive heaves of brine. The desolation was awful! The picture savage, forbidding, terrifying beyond imagination to one immured with its clouded crystal heights over the bows, and the rugged slopes of ice over the stern forking into fifty shapes of pinnacle, turret, spire, column, tower, as though on the flat of the summit were the ruins of a city of marble.