Rapidly--yet slower than a snail's pace, as it seemed to those anxious men--the space narrowed between the bergs and the ships; the grinding crash and crackle of the ice grew momentarily more loud and distracting; the freezing wind from the bergs cut their faces like an invisible razor as it swept down upon them in sudden powerful gusts, apparently intent upon retarding their progress until the last hope of escape should be cut off; the gigantic icy cliffs lowered more and more threateningly down upon them; and at last, when the feeling of doubt and suspense was at its highest, the _Flying Fish_ entered the gap. The channel had by this time become so narrow that for the _Flying Fish_ to pass through it seemed utterly impossible; indeed, it looked as though there remained scarcely room for the barque with her much narrower beam; and as the towering crystal walls closed in upon them every man present felt that the final moment had now come. Everything depended upon Sir Reginald; if at this critical instant his nerve failed him there was nothing but quick destruction and a horrible death for every man there. But the baronet's nerve did _not_ fail him. With a face pale and teeth clenched with excitement, but with a steady pulse and an unquailing eye, he stood with one hand on the tiller and the other on the engine lever, guiding his ship exactly midway through the narrow gorge; and precisely at the right moment, when the _Flying Fish's_ sides were actually grazing the ice on either side, he increased the pressure of his hand upon the lever, the engines revolved a shade more rapidly, and the flying ship slid through the narrowest part of the pass uninjured, but escaping by the merest hair's breadth. But would the barque also get through? She was fully two hundred feet astern of the _Flying Fish_, and the bergs were revolving on their own centres in such a manner that ere many seconds were past they must inevitably come together with a force which would literally annihilate whatever might happen to be between them. And as for the barque--the way in which her bows were burying themselves in the hissing wave that foamed and surged about her cutwater, and the terrified looks of her crew as they glanced, now aloft at the formidable bergs, and now at the straining hawser--from which they stood warily aloof lest it should part, and in so doing inflict upon some of them a deadly injury--told the baronet that he must not increase by a single ounce the strain upon the rope, lest something should give way on board the whaler and leave her there helpless in the very grip of those awful floating mountains of ice.