The scene of ocean was wonderfully grand at this hour: it was not blowing hard, yet the wind out of the heads off the ridges it made, and the swell was rolling now in furrows of foam. The fog was broken up and sailing off in compact masses with the wide white-lived heave of sea gleaming and glancing through the foundations of vapour, till you looked to see the stuff rock as though afloat. Lanes and openings stretched in all directions, and I did not know where to direct my eyes first, so noble, wild, and startling was the picture of that tall black ship showing in a wide, clear space, her canvas waving in squares of light in the framing of the sallow smother, whilst on the starboard quarter hung a stately incomparable spectacle of iceberg, a giant mass, the height vaster to the imagination because the fog showed you bits of it only--in one place marble white cliffs staring through a passage of vapour, a little further on, a gray pinnacle piercing the stuff which streamed off it like torn rag. And now I could hear, but faintly, the noise of the sea breaking along its base. We had passed a good deal of ice during the week; but this was the place where the 'Lady Emma' was abandoned; that white vapour-clothed mountain took a significance none other had. I thought of it as ice that had been seen by Marie's own eyes. It was as a revelation, too, of the savage, forbidding, tremendous scene of desolation the brig was bound to, with myself in her, dreaming, hoping, praying to Almighty God I should find my sweetheart in the hull alive. Many large white and grey birds flew out of the vapour into the openings; they glanced against the marble-like abrupt and vanished. In the midst of a wide flaw right abeam to port, another tall berg was floating. It, too, was a sight of terror and awful beauty, with a look as of frozen foam about the brows of it where the fog was flying, the vapour whitening out to the shadow of the ice as though moon-smitten, whilst low down on the right arched a piece of marvellous architecture, like a Titanic Gothic doorway, through which every swell of the sea flashed, bursting into a terrible fury and dazzling brightness of foam. I looked on in silence, keeping the shelter of the companion, whilst the brig under her little show of cloths broke her way to windward, helped by the tall black ship whose drift was towards us. After some waiting we were within hailing distance. She was just such another whaler as the 'Sea Queen,' but bigger by a couple of hundred tons, worn and weedy, rolling dark decks at us with a glimpse of a black-roofed galley and smoking chimney. She was rich with ice device: fathoms of thick crystal hung from her tops, catheads, bowsprit and quarters; a dull light sank down her glass-like rigging as she swayed. A crowd of men viewed us over her rail, and a man stood awaiting us beside the mizzen rigging, an arm wrapping a backstay, and his figure like a bear's with fur to his heels.