There was no help for it. The guests must be got away. The ladies' "things" were hunted up; the ladies themselves were hurried over the gangway into the boat; Dr. Rudolph took charge of our letters, promising to deliver them to the American consul at Copenhagen; "click, click," went the windlass; up went our white wings, and the last link which bound us to the world--the world of love and warm skies and green meadows--was fairly broken, when we caught from the hill-top the last glimpse of a gay ribbon and the last flutter of a white handkerchief. [Illustration] CHAPTER V. AMONG THE ICEBERGS.--DANGERS OF ARCTIC NAVIGATION.--A NARROW ESCAPE FROM A CRUMBLING BERG.--MEASUREMENT OF AN ICEBERG. [Sidenote: AMONG THE ICEBERGS.] Upernavik is not less the limit of safe navigation than the remotest boundary of civilized existence. The real hardships of our career commenced before its little white gabled church was fairly lost against the dark hills behind it. A heavy line of icebergs was discovered to lie across our course; and, having no alternative, we shot in among them. Some of them proved to be of enormous size, upwards of two hundred feet in height and a mile long; others were not larger than the schooner. Their forms were as various as their dimensions, from solid wall-sided masses of dead whiteness, with waterfalls tumbling from them, to an old weather-worn accumulation of Gothic spires, whose crystal peaks and sharp angles melted into the blue sky. They seemed to be endless and numberless, and so close together that at a little distance they appeared to form upon the sea an unbroken canopy of ice; and when fairly in among them the horizon was completely obliterated. Had we been in the centre of the Black Forest, we could not have been more absolutely cut off from "seeing daylight." As the last streak of the horizon faded from view between the lofty bergs behind us, the steward (who was of a poetical turn of mind) came from the galley, and halting for an instant, cast one lingering look at the opening, and then dropped through the companion scuttle, repeating from the "Inferno":-- "They who enter here leave hope behind." The officers were calling from below for their coffee, and it was never discovered whether the steward was thinking of the cabin or the icebergs. During four days we continued threading our way through this apparently interminable labyrinth. The days passed wearily away, for the wind, at best but a "cat's paw," often died away to a dead calm, leaving us to lounge through the hours in a chilly fog or in the broad blaze of the constant daylight. If this state of things had its novelty, it had too its dangers and anxieties. [Sidenote: PHOTOGRAPHING.]