The hawser being this time temporarily secured in such a manner as to render a repetition of their late accident impossible, and the entire party being, moreover, safely ensconced in the pilot-house, there was no hesitation about again pressing the ship forward at full speed, the channel, luckily, being straight enough to allow of this; and very soon the group of icebergs in which the unfortunate barque was entangled once more appeared in view. Mildmay was at the helm, with the professor standing by the engines; but Sir Reginald and the colonel no sooner saw the bergs than they seized their telescopes and began at once to look out for the barque. At first they could see nothing of her, but presently she glided into view from behind an intervening berg, and a single glance was sufficient to assure them that another five minutes would decide her fate. She had gradually set down into the triangular extremity of the bight in which she was embayed, so that every tack she made became shorter than the one preceding it, and very soon the water space would become so circumscribed as to leave no room for her to manoeuvre. But this was not the worst feature of the case. As desperate diseases are sometimes combated with desperate remedies, so in her desperate condition the hazardous and almost hopeless expedient of berthing her alongside one of the edges of the floe might have been attempted. But this last resource was denied to the despairing seamen, from the fact that two enormous bergs, the vanguard of the fleet, had already reached the edge of the floe, on opposite sides of the bay, to windward of the entrapped barque, and were rapidly rasping their way down toward the apex of the triangle where the whaler was already shooting into stays for what must evidently be her last tack. This would be so short that she could scarcely fail to miss stays on her next attempt, when she would drift helplessly down into the corner of the bight, and be ground out of existence by the berg which first happened to reach that point. It was at this critical moment that a cry of dismay arose simultaneously from the lips of the party in the _Flying Fish's_ pilot-house. A slight turn in the channel had revealed to them the appalling fact that it, also, terminated in a _cul de sac_, a neck of solid ice, some fifty yards in width, dividing it from the open water in which the barque was still battling for her life. What was to be done? There was no time to discuss the question; but a happy inspiration flashed through the baronet's brain. "We must _leap_ the barrier!" he exclaimed. "Right! I understand," was the professor's brief reply; and, turning the compressed air into the water-chambers, he forced out the water and succeeded in raising the sharp nose of the _Flying Fish_ just above the level of the floe a single instant before she reached it.