It was bitterly cold, and when I had come below so dense a fog overhung the sea that the main-yard was out of sight from the wheel. The brig was lying hove to under small canvas, a large smooth Cape Horn swell was running out of the sallow thickness, and the little vessel was rolling horribly, falling into the hollows and swinging to the summits, now on her beam ends, now on a level keel, now with a dip forward that seemed to make her all stern, now with a drop aft that shook the cabin with a hollow roar, every motion being so abrupt, and exaggerated, that it was almost impossible to walk, to stand, even to eat, the plate flying from your hand, whilst the boy waited with a broken head through a fall down the companion ladder. We had passed several icebergs on the previous day, during a very thick morning and afternoon, when the sky had been dark with driving cloud, and the strong wind white with snow, and throughout the night a sharp look-out had been kept for ice; but since daybreak it had been as dense as it was now with an awful silence all round: nothing had once broken the amazing, oppressive stillness upon that sea, sallow as the fog, labouring in volumes of brine soundlessly, saving a strange, fierce noise of blowing heard close upon the bow, though nothing was to be seen there. Cliffe said it was a whale, and I might have guessed that by the sight of the boatswain Bodkin springing with an amazing jump into the fore-shrouds, and leaning away from the ratline he grasped with pricked ears, staring as out of love for his old sport into the choking wool the breathless air was filled with. I was as anxious and restless on account of the ice as any man aboard, though I was no sailor: Cliffe had said it didn't follow, though a hurricane blew, that the smother would clear. I knew that ice must be about: for still we had headed south after passing many bergs, and if wind came and gave us a drift without clearing the ocean for us, we might be foul of an ice mountain ere the mass of it was fairly shaped to the sight within toss of a man's cap. But I forgot our situation for awhile when Cliffe told me where we were and I looked into my note-book. Deep love, deep grief, consecrated to my heart this scene and place of silent hills of water. Here the 'Lady Emma' had been abandoned; here, if the horizon had been visible, then, within the compass of it Marie had been left with her two companions in a dismasted hull amid such floating ice as during the past few days I had gazed at with fear and amazement: from this point the three in that mere raft of ship had drifted--the vessel on to the ice of Coronation Island; that, undoubtedly, she had been seen, described, reported, but her inmates--had they been taken out of her? Or were they frozen corpses in her? Or were they living, within reach of a day or two's sail from the place of ocean Cliffe had found us in that day?