A fire glowed in the little brass grate. The cabin was snug and warm enough with the companion doors closed; but I speedily grew restless after Cliffe had gone on deck. I asked the mate when he came down to dinner how the weather looked. 'Thick as muck, sir.' 'Any signs of wind, Bland?' 'None. But there's no trusting the next minute.' 'Any ice near us, think you?' 'The boatswain's been a snuffling and says he can hear the noise of the beating of water. Nary man else do, though. Them whalemen are so clever they can thread needles with their toes. They can smell grease in a field of grass.' Here he began to munch, and I let him eat. I put on a thick coat and went on deck. The brig's arrest on the smoke-thickened water, when one thought that if it would but clear and the sun flood the south with the sparkling splendour of the South Afric parallels from the mastheads of the brig the loom of the huge dim hill past the cliff where the hull was lying might be seen--this, I say, was maddening. I never could have imagined so dense a fog out of London. It was thick as soup, of a sort of dirty yellow, as though charged with the soot of a city of factories. The dripping wet of it froze as it gathered, and our shrouds were swollen with the glazing, as much of the brig as could be seen was beautiful and novel with fantasies of ice. The topsail clapped in the blankness overhead like shells exploding there: but you could not see it. That was the only noise saving an occasional long sobbing wash of water when the brig heeled straining from the yearning send of the swell. I held by a backstay, Cliffe standing beside me, and rolled my eyes around the sallow blindness, till all of a moment I heard a very faint moan like the noise of a sea running into a cave: it sounded afar, and yet not far either, as though something stood between the cause of it and us. Cliffe heard nothing, though he grimaced in the direction I indicated, and dropped his head on his shoulder to hearken. About this time the mate came up from his dinner. I asked him to listen, suspecting that the noise I had heard was the sound of sea upon ice. After a pretty good spell of silence the three of us listening with all our might, Bland said: 'Sometimes if ice is near and can't be smelt or seen, it may be heard. If you fire off this gun,' said he, putting his hand upon the brass piece, 'and ice is by, it'll answer.' 'Try it,' said I. He promptly went below and returned with the necessary ammunition; where our powder was kept I never inquired. He and Cliffe loaded the gun, the skipper snapping grimace after grimace with nervous excitement. 'Are you all ready?' said I. Bland said 'Yes,' and then shouted to the men forward to stand by to listen for an echo and note its bearings. The forms of the seamen loomed in mere smudges in the fog as they lurched to the rolling bulwarks to hearken. 'Fire!' cried I.