CHAPTER XLVIII.
SKETCHING THE PASSING BERGS.—THE STORY OF AN ICEBERG.
The painter is a model of industry, sketching and painting the bergs as we pass them. They are now clustered on the northern horizon, with a few exceptions. We have been for some time near one, out of which might be cut an entire block of Broadway buildings, evidently presenting the same upper surface that it had when it slid as a glacier from the polar shore. If such is the fact, we infer that in its long glacial experience it could not have remained long near any mass of earth higher than itself, for there is not a stone or particle of dust or earthy stain upon it. It is as spotless as a cloud “after the tempest.” How beautiful is the sentiment of it! It carries the imagination away to those heavenly walls depicted in Revelation, and sends it back upon the track of its own story.
The story of an iceberg! yes, indeed; and a most wonderful tale would it be, could it be truthfully written. It would run up into, and become lost in the story of the great glaciers of Greenland; the half of which science itself has not learned, profoundly as it has penetrated the mysteries of the Alpine glaciers.
There are valleys reaching from the interior to the coast, filled with glaciers of great depth and breadth, which move forward with an imperceptible but regular motion. The continent, as one might call Greenland, does not shed the bulk of its central waters in fluid rivers, but discharges them to the ocean in solid, crystalline, slowly progressing streams. They flow, or rather march, with irresistible, mighty force, and far-resounding footsteps, crossing the shore line, a perpetual procession of block-like masses, flat or diversified with hill and hollow on the top, advancing upon the sea until too deeply immersed longer to resist the buoyant power and pressure of the surrounding waters, when they break upwards, and float suspended in the vast oceanic abyss. The van of the glacial host, previously marked off by fissures into ranks, rushes from the too close embrace of its new element, and wheels away, an iceberg—the glistening planet of the sea, whose mazy, tortuous orbit none can calculate but Him who maps the unseen currents of the main.
When and where, on the lengthy Greenland coast, did this huge block make the grand exchange of elements? Which, if any of these great buildings “not made with hands,” now whitening the blue fields of Neptune, followed or preceded it? What have been its solemn rounds? Through what winters has it slept, and caught the snows upon the folds of its sculptured draperies? How many summers has it bared its spotless bosom to the sun and rains? What nights of auroral splendors have glassed their celestial countenance in its shining mirrors? What baths and vases of blue water have opened their pure depths to moon and stars? What torrents and cascades have murmured in its glassy chasms, crystal grottoes, Alpine dells? And who shall count its battles with the waves and tempests, when with the surf about its shoulders and among its locks, and the clouds around its brow, it stood far up from the unsounded valleys of ocean “tiptoe on the mountain top”?
In the defiles and gorges of the Arctic coast are prodigious accumulations of ice—the congelation of small streams flowing from the adjacent mountains—the glaciers of the coast range, in short. These gradually encroach upon, and overhang the sea; and are continually breaking off, from the undermining of the waves which beat at their base. Such is the depth of water, that the hugest avalanche of ice can fall with safety to itself, and float away.
When, and in what bay or inlet, may this Great Northern have been launched? Out of what gloomy fiord may have rolled the billows, after its icy fastenings were loosed, and it slid, with the thunder of an earthquake, down its slippery ways, and plunged into the black deep?
Until science have her beaten pathway over polar waves and hills, and measure the rain-falls and the snow-falls, and the freezings of the one and the compactings of the other, the story of the glacier and the iceberg, in their native land and seas, will be left, in part, to the imagination—a faculty, after all, that will ever deal with those wonderful ices about as satisfactorily as the faculty that judges according to the sense, as Bishop Leighton calls the mere scientific faculty. The truth of this is illustrated by the very icebergs about us. Emphatically as they speak to the naturalist with his various instrumentalities, they speak, at the same moment, with marvellous eloquence to the poet and the painter. There are forces, motions, and forms, voices, beauties, and a sentiment, which escape the touch of science, and are scarcely caught by the subtle, poetic mind. Icebergs, to the imaginative soul, have a kind of individuality and life. They startle, frighten, awe; they astonish, excite, amuse, delight and fascinate; clouds, mountains and structures, angels, demons, animals and men spring to the view of the beholder. They are a favorite playground of the lines, surfaces and shapes of the whole world, the heavens above, the earth and the waters under: of their sounds, motions and colors also. These are the poet’s and the painter’s fields, more than they are the fields of the mere naturalist, much as they are his. Do not these fifty bergs, in sight from any crag frowning in its iron strength above the surf, speak more a living language to the creative, than to the mensural faculty? Let us see.
They have a daily experience, and a current history more remarkable now than ever. Whatever may have been the wonders of their conception, birth and growth; however lengthy and devious their voyage, they are present in these strange seas, in these tepid waters and soft airs, to undergo their last, fatal changes, and dissolve forever into their final tomb. There are fifty icebergs, more or less. Apparently similar in appearance, yet each differs widely from all others. Exhibiting similar phenomena, yet each has complexions, movements, sounds and wonders of its own. If we choose, though, to add to the performances of to-day, those of yesterday and to-morrow, we shall find that the experience of any one berg closely resembles that of all. The entire circle of its looks and doings corresponds with the circle of nearly every other berg, and so of all together, differing merely in the matter of time—as to when the changes take place. The description upon which I will venture, and which might be gleaned from the foregoing pages, is, therefore, strictly true, except that the phases and accidents are supposed to occur in rapid succession. In a word, what you would behold in all of these fifty, within twenty-four hours, you are to fancy of one, in the course of an afternoon.
I have before me, in my mind’s eye, the Windsor Castle berg, fresh from the north, and the Great Castle berg, of Belle Isle water, which it entered early last May, and as large, at the time of its arrival, as both of them at present combined. And so I am looking at a veritable berg of Cape St. Louis, small, though, in comparison with the berg of Cape St. Francis, “a vast cathedral of dazzling white ice, with a front of 250 feet perpendicular from the sea,” visited by the Bishop of Newfoundland in the summer of 1853.
I will describe, first, the figure of the berg. It is a combination of Alp, castle, mosque, Parthenon and cathedral. It has peaks and slopes; cliffs, crags, chasms and caverns; lakes, streams and waterfalls. It has towers, battlements and portals. It has minarets, domes and steeples; roofs and gables; balustrades and balconies; fronts, sides and interiors; doors, windows and porches; steps and entrances; columns, pilasters, capitals and entablatures; frieze, architrave and cornice; arches, cloisters, niches, statuary and countless decorations; flutings, corrugations, carvings, panels of glassy polish and in the rough; Greek, Roman, Gothic, Saracenic, Pagan, Savage. It is crested with blades and needles; heaped here and there with ruins, blocks and bowlders, splintered and crumbled masses. This precipice has a fresh, sharp fracture; yonder front, with its expanse of surface beautifully diversified with sculptured imagery and other ornament, has the polish of ivory—the glassy polish of mirrors—the enamel of sea-shells—the fierce brightness of burnished steel—the face of rubbed marble—of smoothest alabaster—of pearl—porcelain—lily-white flesh—lily-white wax—the flesh-finish of beauty done in the spotless stone of Italy. This, though, is but the iceberg of the air; the head and crown only of the iceberg of the deep sea.
From the figure of the berg, I will come to describe an important feature of its life and history: its motion; not its movement from place to place, but upon its centre—its rotation and vibration. Where the berg is not grounded—in which case it only beats and sways to and fro, vibrating through the arc of a circle like an inverted pendulum—when it is not grounded, it must be supposed to hang suspended at the surface—all but the topmost part—just under the surface of the ocean, very much as a cloud, a great white thunder-head, hangs suspended in the upper air. Balanced around its heart, far down in the deep, and in its cold solidity “dry as summer dust”—poised upon its centre with perfect exactness, it is evident that the loss of a single ton of ice shifts that centre, shifts it an ounce-notch on the bar of the mighty scale, destroys the equilibrium, and subjects the whole to the necessity of some small movement in order to regain its rest. When, instead of one ton, thousands fall off, it sets a rolling the whole clifted and pinnacled circumference.
And here begins that exhibition of novel forms and shapes, and of awful force, and the sublimity of stupendous masses in motion, that so impresses, awes, startles, and fascinates the beholder. A berg in repose, wondrous as it is to him that dares to linger in its presence, differs from itself in action, as a hero in his sleep differs from himself upon the field of battle.
With regard to the motions of the berg, it must be borne in mind, that, from the fact of its centre being not on a level with the surface of the sea, but at depths below, they are quite different from what might at first be imagined. A rough globe, revolving upon its axis, with but a small portion of its bulk, say a twelfth, above the water; or, better still, the hub and spokes merely of a common wagon wheel, slowly rolling back and forth, will serve for illustration. The uppermost spoke, in its vibrations to the right and left, describes a line of some extent along the surface, not unlike an upright stick moving to and fro, and gradually rising and sinking as it moves. In this movement back and forth, the two adjacent spokes will be observed to emerge and disappear correspondingly. In this way, a berg of large diameter, instead of falling over upon the sea like a wall or precipice, appears to advance bodily, slowly sinking as it comes, with a slightly increasing inclination toward you. In its backward roll, this is reversed. It seems to be retreating, slowly rising as it floats away, with a slightly increasing inclination from you. In these grand vibrations, projecting points and masses of opposite sides correspondingly emerge and disappear, rising apparently straight up out of the sea on this side, going down as straight on the other.
From the figure and motion of the berg, I come to describe the motive power, rather the explosive power, through which the delicate balance is destroyed, and motion made a necessity in order to gain again equilibrium and rest. Whatever may be the latent heat of ice, is a question for the professed naturalist. Two things are evident to the unlearned observer: an iceberg is as solid as ivory, or marble from the lowest depths of a quarry, and cold apparently as any substance on the earth can be made. This compact and perfectly frozen body, immersed in the warm seas of summer, and warmer atmosphere, finds its entire outside, and especially that portion of it which is exposed to the July sun, expanding under the influence of the penetrating heat. The scrutiny of science would, no doubt, find it certain that this heat, in some measure, darts in from all sides in converging rays to the very heart. The expanding power of heat becomes at length an explosive force, and throws off, with all the violence and suddenness of gunpowder, in successive flakes, portions of the surface. The berg, then, bursts from expansion, as when porcelain cracks with sharp report, suddenly and unequally heated on the winter stove. Judge of the report when the porcelain of a great cliff cracks and falls, or when the entire berg is blasted asunder by the subtle, internal fire of the summer sun! If you would hear thunders, or whole broadsides and batteries of the heaviest ordnance, come to the iceberg then.
Speaking incidentally of noises, reminds me of the hues and tints of the iceberg. Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like the flowers of the field. Would you behold this berg apparelled with a glory that eclipses all floral beauty, and makes you think, not only of the clouds of heaven at sunrise and sunset, but of heaven itself, you must come to it at sunrise and at sunset. Then, too, you would hear its voices and its melodies, the deep and mournful murmuring of the surf in its caverns. Hark! In fancy I hear them now, half thunder, and half the music of some mighty organ.
And this reminds me of the sea, which shares with the iceberg something of the glory and the power. In the first place, from the white brightness of the ice, the eye is tuned to such a high key, or so stimulated and bedazzled, that the ocean is not only dark by contrast, but dark in reality. It is purple, so deep as to amount almost to blackness—an evening violet I would call it, a complexion magnificent and rich exceedingly in the blaze of noon, and at late and early hours when the skies are full of brilliant colors. What heightens the effect of this dye of the ocean, is the pale emerald water around the berg, and in which it floats as in a vast bath, the loveliness, clarity and divine beauty of which no language can paint in a way to kindle the proper feeling and emotion. From ten to fifty feet in breadth, it encircles the berg, a zone or girdle of sky-green, that most delicate tint of the sunset heavens, and lies, or plays with a kind of serpent play, between the greenish white ice and the violet water, as the bright deeps of air lie beyond the edge of a blue-black cloud. There is no perceptible blending, but a sharp line which follows, between the bright and the dark, the windings of the berg, across which you may, if you have the temerity, row the bow of your whale-boat, and gaze down, down the fearfully transparent abyss, until the dim ice-cliffs and the black deeps are lost in each other’s awful embrace.
I have spoken of the figure, motion, and the breaking of the iceberg, incidentally mentioning its sounds, its colors, and the surrounding waters. You are now ready to go with us, and spend the afternoon about it. Early in the morning, and for the last hour, all but its heights and peaks has been wrapped in cloud-like fog. That, you discover, is thinning off, and will presently all pass away. The breeze is fresh from the north, and we will sail down upon the north-eastern side, until we have it between us and the 3 o’clock sun. We are upon soundings, and, as we glide from the broad sunny tract into the shadow of the berg, the ocean should be green, a deep green. But we have been sailing with the white ice in our eyes, and you see the ocean a dark purple. The captain drops sail, and sets the men at their oars. As the current sets back from the berg—the reverse of the current below—you notice that they are pulling slowly, but steadily forward without any perceptible advance. We are distant a good hundred yards, as near again as we ought to be for safety. But this is the position for the painter, and it will be the care of the captain to keep it, the required time, as nearly as possible.
As the broad roller lifts us lightly and gracefully, and leaves us sinking on its after-slope, how majestic is the silent march of it, the noiseless flight of it! But look!—look!—as it flees in all its imposing breadth of darkness, see the great, green star upon its breast—a spangle green as grass, as the young spring grass in the sunshine, gleaming like some skylight of the deep, some emerald window in the dome of the sea-palace, letting up the splendor. What do you suppose that is? It is ice, a point of the berg pricking up into the illuminated surface and reflecting the light. You will understand that better, perhaps, by and by. But wait an instant. Now!—now!—Beauty strikes the billow with her magic rod, and, presto—change!—all is glittering green. A thousand feet of purple, cloud-like wave passes, in the twinkling of an eye, into the brightness of an emerald gem, and thus rolls up and smites the iceberg. And thus, like night perpetually bursting into the splendid noon, roll up the billows, and strike the minutes of the hour. How beautiful is the transfiguration! See them split upon this angle of the castle; and as they run along the walls, with the whispery, hissing sound of smoothly sliding waters, mark how high they wash, and sweep them with their snowy banners, here and there bending over, and curling into long scrolls of molten glass, which burst in dazzling foam, and plunge in many an avalanche of sparkling jewelry. Into the great porch of yonder Parthenon they rush in crowds, and thunder their applause upon the steps.
Is not all this very grand and beautiful? Have you ever seen the like before? The like of it is not to be seen upon the planet, apart from the icebergs. With cold, fixed, white death, life—warm, elastic, palpitating, glorious, powerful life—is wrestling, and will inevitably throw. Do you see “the witchery of the shadows”? Pray look aloft. Castle, temple, cliff, all built into one, are draped with shadows softer than the tint of doves, the morning’s early gray, dappled with the warm pearly blues of heaven, and edged with fire. The sun is behind the ice, and the light is pouring over. A flood of light is pouring over. All is edged with fire, streaming with lightning; all its notched and flowing edges hemmed with live, scintillating sunshine, ruby, golden, green, and blue. See you below that royal sepulchre through its crystal door? Beauty hangs her lamp in there, and the sky-blue shadow looks like the fragrant smoke of it. Now tell me, was there ever any thing more lovely? Have the poets dreamed of rarer loveliness? The surf springs up like an angel from the tomb, and, with a shout of triumph, strikes it with its silvery wings. Ha! you start. But do not be frightened. It was only the cracking of the iceberg. But was there ever such a blow?—quick—tremulous—ringing—penetrating. Why, it jarred the sea, and thrilled the heart like an electric shock. One feels as if the berg had dropped, instantly dropped an inch, and cracked to the very core. Captain Knight, shall we not fall back a little? we are surely getting too close under.
While I have been talking, the painter, who sits midship, with his thin, broad box upon his knees, making his easel of the open lid, has been dashing in the colors. The picture is finished, and so, at the word, the men pull heavily at their oars, and we come round upon the south-eastern, or the cathedral front, as I will call it, from the fact that the general appearance is architectural, and the prevailing style, the Gothic. A dome and minaret, curiously thrown in upon one wing of the berg, and some elaborately cut arches opening through the water-line into the cloister-like cavern, would suggest the Saracenic. But the pointed and the perpendicular prevail, springing up full of life and energy, vivid and flame-like in their forms.
As the berg faces, we are getting the last glances of the 4 o’clock sun, and have broad sheets of both light and shadow. You see how spirited the whole thing is. It is full of brilliant, strong effects. While the hollows and depressions harbor the soft, slaty shadows, points and prominences fairly blaze and sparkle with sunshine. The current now, you discover, sweeps us past the ice, and compels us to turn about and row up the stream. Here is the point where all is strong and picturesque, and here they hold on for the painter. Let us sit upon the little bow-deck, and look, and listen to the noises of the waves at play in the long, concealed, under-sea piazza. How they slap the hollow arches! Hisses, long-drawn sighs, booming thunder-sounds, mingle with low muttering, plunging, rattling, and popping—a bedlam of all the lunatic voices of the ocean. We appear to be at the edge of a shower, such a sprinkling and spattering of drops. All abroad, and all aloft, from every edge and gutter the iceberg spouts, and rains, and drips. Over the entire face of the ice is flowing swiftly down one noiseless river thin as glass, looking, for all the world, like the perpetual falling of a transparent veil over the richest satin. Here and there, the delicate stream cuts into the silvery enamel, and engraves, in high relief, brilliant shields of jewelry, diamonds, rubies, amethysts, emeralds and sapphires. But yonder is a rare touch of the enchanter. Pray, look at it carefully. It is a glistening blue line of ice, threading the whiteness from top to bottom, a good two hundred feet. It looks as if the berg were struck, not with lightning, but with sapphire. It is simply transparent ice, and may be compared to a fissure filled with pellucid spring-water, with depths of darkness beyond the visible, illuminated edge. Darkness below the pure light flowing in, and reflecting from the inner sides of the white ice, gives us the blue. You understand the process by which so beautiful a result is effected? Well, the glacier of which this berg is a kind of spark, is mainly compacted snows, compressed to metallic hardness in the omnipotent grasp of nature. As it slides on the long, inland valley slope, it bends and cracks. The surface-water fills the crevice, and is frozen. Thus the glacier is mended, but marked forever with the splendid scar which you see before you. You fancy it has the hardness of a gem; it is softer than the flinty masses between which it seems to have been run like a casting. On the opposite slope of the berg, you will find it the channel of a torrent, melting and wearing faster than the primitive ice.
How terribly startling is this explosion! It resounded like a field-piece. And yet you perceive only a small bank of ice floating out from below where it burst off. Small as it is, the whole berg has felt it, and is slightly rolling on its deep down centre. You perceive that it is a perfectly adjusted pair of scales, and weighs itself anew at the loss of every pound. At the loss of every ounce, the central point, around which millions of tons are balanced, darts aside a very little, and calls upon the entire bulk to make ready and balance all afresh. You see the process going on. There, the water-line is slowly rising; and you peep into the long, greenish-white hollow, polished and winding as the interior of a sea-shell. Now it pauses, and returns. So will it rise and sink alternately until it stands like a headland of everlasting marble.
Again the painter wipes his brushes, puts away his second picture, and tacks a fresh pasteboard within the cover of his box, and gives the word to pull for the south-western side. How finely nature sculptures her decorations! Would not Palmer, Powers, and others of that company, whose poetic language is in spotless stone, love to be with us? Mark the high reliefs, and the deep, fine fluting of this angle, as we pass from the Temple front to the clifted. Here you see less to please, and more to terrify. A word or so describes it: It is a precipice of sparkling, white ice, freshly broken. The edge of newly broken china is nearest like it, with the suspicion of green for forty feet or more up, the reflection of that lovely pale green water. How the currents recoil and roll in upon the huge wall in whirling eddies, requiring steady toil at the oars, to keep off a plump two hundred yards, the proper distance for sketching so large a perpendicular mass.
If we except the quality and texture of the fracture, there is little to paint in all this blaze of sunlight. The outline of the berg, though, is worth remembering. It cuts the blue vault like the edge of a bright sword, and pricks it with flashing spears. The eye darts from point to point along its lengthy, zig-zag and flowing thread, and sweeps from the sea upward and over to the sea again. How persistently the treacherous current labors to bear us in upon the cliff! Let alone the oars five minutes, and we should be among the great rain-drops slipping from the overhanging crags.
Horrible! The berg is burst. The whole upper front is coming. There it is—gone in the sea. Keep still!—Keep still!—Don’t be frightened! The captain will manage it. Here come the big swells. Hurra! Look out for the next! Here we go—splendid! Now for the third and last. How she combs as she comes. Hurra!—Hurra! Here we are—all safe—inside of them. See them go!—racing over the ocean, circles of plumed cavalry. Now for the berg. He’ll make a magnificent roll of it, if he don’t go to pieces. Should he, then put us half a mile away. See it rise!—The water-line—rising—rising—up—up. It looks like a carriage-way. Hark!—Crack—crack—crack. Quick!—quick! Look at the black water here!—all spots and spangles of green. Something is coming! There it comes! The very witchcraft of the deep—Neptune’s half-acre, bowers, thrones, giants, eagles, elephants, vases spilling, fountains pouring, torrents tumbling, glassy banks. Look at the peaks slanting off into the blue air, and the great slant precipice. Hah! Don’t you see? It is coming again—slowly coming! Crack—crack—crack. Down sinks the garden—on roll the swells—down go bowers, thrones, statuary—lost amid the tumult and thunder of the surf. Over bends the precipice—this way over—frightfully over—in roll the waves—roaring, thundering in—dashing, lashing crag and chasm. Wonderful to see! Waterfalls bursting into light above—plunging in snowy columns to the sea.
How terrible—terrible all this is! But O, how beautiful! Who, that does not witness it, knows any thing of the bursting of an iceberg? It comes with the crash of a thunderbolt. But how can one tell the horrible, shocking noise? A pine split by lightning has the point, but not the awful breadth and fulness of the sound. Air, ocean, and the berg, all fairly spring at the power of it. And then the ice-fall, with its ringing, rumbling, crashing roar, and the heavy, explosion-like voice of the final plunge, followed by the wild, frantic dashing of the waters. You see the whole upper face of the ice, yards deep, and scores of them in width, all gone. All was blasted off instantly, and dropped at once, a stupendous cataract of brilliant ruins.
Here we are, at last, where the painter will revel—between the glories of sunset and the iceberg. What shall we call all this magnificence, clustered in a square quarter of a mile? The Bernese Alps in miniature. A dark violet sea, and Alps in burnished silver, with the colors of the rainbow dissolving among them. Lofty ridges, of the shape of flames, have the tint of flame; out of the purity of lilies bloom the pink and rose; sky-blue shadows sleep in the defiles; I will not say cloth of gold drapes, but water of gold washes—water of green, of orange, scarlet, crimson, purple, wash the crags and steeps; strange metallic tints gleam in the shaggy caverns—copper, bronze, and gold. Endless grace of form and outline!—endless, endless beauty! Its shining image is in the deep, hanging there as in a molten looking-glass. Look down and see it. Now the last rays of day strike the berg. How the hues and tints change and flit, flush and fade! A very mirror for the fleeting glories of the sunset, or the fitful complexions of the northern light. Prodigal Nature! Is she ever wasting splendors at this rate? Watch them on this broad, slanting park of lily-white satin. White!—It has just a breath of pink. Pink?—It is the richest rose—rose deepening into purple—purple trembling into blue, pearly blue, skirted with salmon-tints and lilac. Where are the train-bearers of this imperial robe? There they are, the smooth, black swells, one, two, three, rolling up, and changing into green as they roll up—far up, and break in sparkling diamonds on the bosom of the lustrous alabaster.
Do you hear the music? O what power in sound! Clothed in green and silver, the royal bands of the great deep are playing at every portal of the iceberg. Hark! Half thunder, and half the harmony of grand organs.
“Waters, in the still magnificence,
Their solemn cymbals beat.”
The painter’s work is over. And now for harbor—all sails spread—a downy pressure on them, and the twilight ocean. Indomitable pencil! If the man is not at it again!—A last, flying sketch in lead. Let us take one more look at the berg—a farewell look. It is a beautiful creation—superlatively beautiful. It is more—sublime and beautiful—fold upon fold—spotless ermine—caught up from the billows, and suspended by the fingers of Omnipotence.
The Merciful One! It is falling!—Cliffs and pinnacles bursting—crashing—tumbling with redoubling thunders.—Pillars and sheaves of foam leap aloft.—Wave chases wave, careering wild and high.—Columns and splintered fragments spring from the deep convulsively, toppling and plunging.—A multitude of small icebergs spot the dusky waters. One slender obelisk, slowly rocking to and fro, stands a monument among the scattered ruins.