and on every side rose huge bergs from one hundred feet to two hundred feet in height, and enclosing a space of barely a mile in circumference; an ice-bound lake, in fact; and, what struck a chill of terror to our hearts as we gazed, a lake without any exit. Look as we might, there was not the least sign of an opening. Unwittingly we had sailed or drifted into a girdle of conjoined bergs. During the night the passage through which we entered had closed, and a cruel and stupendous barrier, hard as granite, slippery as glass, lay betwixt us and the outer ocean. Within, the water was as smooth as a mill-pond, the air was quite warm, and after breakfast all hands went ‘ashore’ to stretch their legs, look wonderingly up at our prison walls, and speculate on the chances of getting out. As I gazed around me at the strange scene—the snow-clad, towering peaks, glittering coldly in the yet feeble sun rays, the deep, shadow-laden valleys at their bases, and the perpendicular curtains of naked, steely-blue ice connecting one berg with the other—there came to my mind some long-forgotten lines of Montgomery’s, in which he depicts the awful fate of an ice-bound vessel:— There lies a vessel in that realm of frost, Not wrecked, not stranded, but for ever lost; Its keel embedded in the solid mass; Its glistening sails appear expanded glass; The transverse ropes with pearls enormous strung. * * * * * Morn shall return, and noon, and eve, and night Meet here with interchanging shade and light; But from that barque no timber shall decay; Of these cold forms no feature pass away. I had rather enjoyed the first days of our Antarctic experiences, but the pleasure began decidedly to pall with such a horrible contingency in view, and I was now fully as anxious as anyone for clear water and a straight course. After a while, the gig was manned, and, with the captain and chief mate, we pulled round our harbour to a spot where, from the ship, a part of the ice-curtain seemed low and pretty accessible. So it had appeared; but when we reached it we found fifty feet of perpendicular slippery wall between our boat’s gunwale and the summit of the ridge we had hoped to mount. ‘We’re in a pooty nice kind o’ a fix,’ said our mate, as we returned. ‘An’,’ glancing at the lowering sky, ‘I reckon it’s going to blow some, presently. Mebbe it’ll blow us out o’ these chunks of ice.’ The captain made no reply, but he was evidently not in a very cheerful state of mind.