The decks were swept of everything save the companion. Wheel, binnacle, capstans, galley, all were gone. I watched the ocean rolling past the arm of ice astern, it was but a bit of it. The great berg that formed the bay blocked the view of the deep; there was nothing to see but the abrupt white walls ahead and astern, and the flying soot overhead and away down to port, and, on the right, tall cliffs of ice and snow glazing the land, with here and there a space of staring, black rock. Our isolation was shocking. My heart seemed to stop whilst I looked around, realising the terrors and hopelessness of this new imprisonment by the granite-hued light that was gaining a little in power. Though a whaler stood within half a mile of the coast, how should she see us? It would be hard enough to discern the speck of wreck we made had the bay of ice in which we rested gaped naked to the sea, but we were as much hidden here as if we had gone to the bottom. We were worse off, indeed, than had we stranded upon a floating berg, because in _that_ case we might have fallen in with the ice which might have split and freed us; but now we were aground upon ice hardening into the face of an island and stationary; months might pass before the body we were upon broke away and became a water-borne bulk, and then, in the throes of the liberation of the frozen cliffs, what of splintering, of volcanic-like upheaval and disruption might happen to crush the little toy of hull lying after many months as she lay now? I don't doubt I stared about me with something of a madman's wildness, glancing up at the inaccessible heights, then at the sea rolling in white lines beyond the limb of ice, then into the desolation of the whirling sky on the left, till, recollecting that I had a companion who looked to me for heart and encouragement, whom, by God's mercy, wonderful as it would afterwards appear, I might yet be the means of delivering from this hideous situation, I pulled my wits together and returned to the cabin. The poor young lady was on the deck before the black stove as I had left her. She could not have stood upon that angle of plank without danger and distress. She began to question me in a voice that shuddered with the cold. I answered I would talk with her when I had lighted a fire, for I had now some spirit and saw things a little clearly, and was no longer afraid of setting the hull in flames. I split up a bunk board, and picked a bucket full of capsized coal out of the wash to leeward, as I may call it, and made a fire; but I moved with pain and difficulty; the decks were wet, and as slippery as though coated with ice, and the slope was that of a ship bulwarks under.