Happily, it was midsummer, and the night comparatively short. The dawn was fair and rosy, and the sun rose upon a dark blue sea, frothing far as the eye could pierce, and magnificent with ice. I cannot express the gorgeous scene of colour that sunrise called into being. In all directions the ice lay in a hundred shapes, some of the islands sparkling like prisms; I beheld floating cities of porcelain, enormous shapes in alabaster, figures of marble, monstrous and grotesque as those huge forms of rock which stand in a congregation of Titans at the base of some of the precipitous heights of Table Bay. But though there was plenty of ice in the south, there was an abundance of room too for our passage; the mate came down from the fore royal yard with a telescope slung on his back and said he saw no barrier; he thought, but would not then swear, he could make out a faint shadow of land. If he was right, then the mountain that centres Coronation Island was in sight! The breeze was fresh out of the north-west, with a high following sea, and soon after the sun was risen and Cliffe had taken a long look round, he ordered sail to be made. The foretopsail was loosed, reefs shaken out, and cloths piled upon the little vessel to the topgallant yards; _then_, like something alive and released, the little ship fled southwards. CHAPTER XXVII CORONATION ISLAND But it was not till next day that we had the land in view, and then it was ten o'clock on February morning, making it a few days above a month since we had sailed out of Table Bay. As on the previous day, so on this, the sun shone brightly, with even some comfort of warmth in its light. Many great clouds of a milk-white softness were sailing into the east; the wind was fresh out of the west, but though the sea ran briskly, with a shrewd vapour of salt in the shrill fling of the frothing curls, it was not a hollow sea; it rolled the brig in stately measures, but she was now under small sail, the ice being very plentiful and the sea crowded with bergs of all sizes, whilst right ahead were tall cliffs of ice backed by a blue shadow of mountain rising into a silver faintness where the eternal snows upon it sparkled and died out from the sight in the deep blue. I was beside myself with excitement and wretched with distress of expectation, dread, and hope. That height of white cliff right ahead, broken in the foreground by pale floating islands, its face discoloured in places as though the ice that masked the rock had broken from the black and savage rampart, was Coronation Island, and on the port bow, looming distant but immense, were the mountains of Laurie Island.