“Let her go in!” yelled Gale.
“Be smashed, if we do. Go to hell in five minutes!”
“Don’t care! hell can’t be worse than this!”
In the electric blaze of the cabin I looked more closely at Gale. There was a green pallor over his features that was not due to fright. Even in that awful hour there came upon me a proper and malicious joy. He was seasick! I did not blame him. We were rolling fearfully and I felt some discomfort, myself. But the spirit of my ancestors had waxed strong now, and prevailed. The others, too, were getting pale, all except Zar, who turned a peculiar blue, and discontinued her prayer service. The brawny stewardess and myself assisted both her and her mistress to their staterooms, where I spoke a reassuring word to Edith Gale, and hastened back to the others. But Gale and Ferratoni had both disappeared, and I saw them no more during that fearful night.
Plunging and battering we jammed our way into that mass of thundering ice. Our search-lights, of which we had two, were kept going constantly, but even so, we were likely at any moment to collide with a berg in that surging blackness. The sight from the deck—the shouting sea, with the ice tossing and flashing as it was borne into the angle of our electric rays—was as the view of a riotous inferno that was making ready to crush us into its sombre depths.
But by morning we had penetrated the pack to a point where the violence beneath produced on the surface only a heaving, groaning protest at our presence. With the return of light, I went out to view our condition, and when I realized that our invincible Billowcrest had battled unhurt through it all, that noble vessel—whatever may have been her faults, and in spite of all disparagement—took a place in my affections that was only outranked by those of her builder and her mistress. The wind slackened in the afternoon, and with the calm there came clear, intense cold. By morning the great ice-floes about us were cemented together. We were frozen solidly in the pack.
XIV.
AN EXCURSION AND AN EXPERIMENT.
“Well, here we are,” announced Captain Biffer, as we grouped together on the deck to survey the scene. “And here we’re likely to stay for one while, I’m thinking. This is your warm world—how do you like it?”
“Better than a cold sea,” I said, “when there’s a northeast gale blowing.”
“How long do we lay up here, Chase?” asked Chauncey Gale. “You’re running this excursion.”