CHAPTER XLIII.
THE ICEBERG OF THE FIGURE-HEAD.—THE GLORY AND THE MUSIC OF THE SEA AT EVENING.
Late in the afternoon, and the breeze gone down. We are off on the gentle rollers of the Bay of St. Louis, after a low, broad iceberg, covering, say, an acre of surface, and grounded in forty fathoms of water. It has upon one extremity a bulky tower of sixty feet, on the other, forty, and in the middle a huge pile of ice blocks of all shapes and sizes, the ruins of some spire. While the outside of this heap of fragments is white, with tints of green, touched here and there with what seems to be the most delicate bronze and gilding; every crevice, where there is a shadow lurking, is a blue, the purity and softness of which cannot be described nor easily imagined. To one who has any feeling for color, it has a sentiment as sweet as any thing in all visible nature. A pure, white surface, like this fine opaque ice, seen through deep shade produces blue, and such a blue as one sees in the stainless sky when it is full of warmth and light. It is quite beyond the rarest ultramarine of the painter. The lovely azure appears to pervade and fill the hollows like so much visible atmosphere or smoke. One almost looks to see it float out of the crystal cells where it reposes, and thin away into colorless air.
We have just been honored by a royal salute from the walls of the alabaster fortress. Our kind angels will keep us at a safer distance than we are disposed to keep ourselves. A projecting table has fallen with that peculiarly startling crack, quick as lightning and loud as thunder. It seems impossible for my nerves to become accustomed to the shock. I tremble, in spite of myself, as one does after a fright. The explosion unquestionably has the voice of the earthquake and volcano. To my surprise, I find myself with cold feet and headache—those unfailing symptoms of sea-sickness. By the painful expression of his face, I suspect the painter is even worse off than myself. It is impossible to avoid feeling both vexed and amused at this companionship in misery. In his case, the climax has been attained. Laying down box and brushes with uncommon emphasis, he made a rapid movement to the edge of the boat, and looked over at his own image reflected in the glassy, oily-rolling swell, with loud and violent demonstrations of disagreement with himself. After this unhappy outbreak, he wiped away the tears, and returned subdued and composed to the gentler employment of the paint-box.
It is nearly nine o’clock in the evening, with the downiest clouds dropped around the retiring sun. What light must be behind them to fill them with such wealth of color, and dye their front with such rich and varied red! The very waves below bloom with a crimson splendor. C—— has finished his pictures, and we row around the berg, a singularly irregular one, both above and below the surface. The surrounding water, to the eye nearly black, is irradiated, star-like, with tracts of the clear, tender green. The effect upon us is indescribably fine. I think of deep down caverns of light shining up through the dark sea. The blocks and bowlders, wrecks of former towers, which lie scattered and in heaps upon the main berg, are like the purest alabaster on their outer and upper sides, but of that heavenly azure in their fissures and spaces, although wrapped in the one great shade of evening. We now pause at the corner of the ice, and look down both its northern and western fronts; the upper stories, to all appearance, in rough marble—the lower, polished as a mirror. Almost over us, a Greek-like figure-head, sculptured from shining crystal, gazes with serene majesty upon the white daylight in the northwest. Possessed with the mournful and nearly supernatural beauty, we forget the dangers of this intimacy. There is a strange fascination, and particularly at this hour, that draws like the fabulous music of the Sirens. We are headed homeward, riding silently over the glassy waves. The surf rings in the hollows of the iceberg, and sounds upon the shores like the last blows of the weary day.