Joe was the first to rouse from his stupefaction. “Go forward,” he said, “into the chain locker. Knock the shackling pins out of both those cables and let them run overboard. Then come down into the engine-room with me.” Harry did as he was bidden in a sort of dream, the plunge from bright hope to chill fear was so great. In the engine-room he found Joe, sweating. “We can’t do it,” he cried. “If the Eskimos had only come to us, we would have been all right; but two of us cannot fire, and run the engine, and steer ship, all at the same time, even if we could get out of the grip of the ice. I’m afraid we’re done for.” Even as he spoke the ship staggered. The ice had crashed against her with such force that both boys were thrown from their feet. Joe stopped the engines, which had been turning slowly. “I’m afraid we’re done for,” he repeated, and took his way to the deck, followed by Harry. The scene that met them there was one never to be forgotten. No man may stand in the forefront of the onrush of the Arctic pack and forget it. Cakes of ice leaped like wolves on its forward edge. Behind them crushed the solid phalanx of the sea, white, resistless, terrible. The wolf cakes sprang at the ship, and bit at it. They leaped upon the solid shore floe, and climbed one another’s shoulders there, and always just behind them came the forward impulse of that great white sea of ice. The touch of this main pack crumpled the shore floe. It crushed the Bowhead’s staunch sides as if they had been eggshells. The decks burst from beneath with the pressure, the tall masts toppled and fell, and the wreck, crashing and grinding into the shore ice, became but a formless part of the ridge that the pack pushed up in front of it as it moved majestically shoreward. Mightily, foot by foot, it moved. Ice cakes burst with the roar of artillery, snapped like rifles, and the rumble of floe on floe was like the onrushing hoof-beats of a million cavalry. The cohorts of the ever-victorious Frost King were in full charge. Higher and higher piled this ridge of onslaught, nearer and nearer the shore it pushed, and the once staunch ship was rolled and pounded to chaff under the hoof-beats of its white horses. Out of the white turmoil of death and terror it is hard to tell how the two boys escaped. Certainly neither of them knew. There was a confused recollection of planks bursting beneath their feet, of spars that, falling, mercifully spared them, of leaping and scrambling from toppling cakes to unsteady, crumbling ridges, of the howling of winds in their ears, and the sting of brine on their faces. Then they were being pulled and hauled and hustled across the heaving shore floe by Kroo and Harluk and others, who had rushed to their rescue and endangered their own lives to help their friends. Panting, exhausted, both in body and nerves, they lay in the little tents and listened to the howl of the gale.