Apparently he was right. Motionless, silent for the most part, we stood, clinging to our useless sledgeloads of pemmican. That terrifying ring, irresistible, inexorable, shrank in on us. Numbly we waited for that avalanche of ice to come tumbling aboard, crushing us like flies, crushing our ship.
On it came. Fifty fathoms, forty fathoms, thirty fathoms. Then as inexplicably as the motion had started, it stopped, a shiplength or so away, leaving us after an hour of looking death squarely in the face, limp, completely drained of emotions, and incredulous almost of being still alive. Slowly the hills of ice flattened out, there remaining around us an indescribable “Bad Lands” of broken floes; and the shrieking died away into a strange quiet except for the rumble of underrunning floes bumping along in the current beneath our pack. It was over, we were safe, our vessel undamaged. Yet had the ship been a few hundred feet in any direction from the exact spot in which she lay, she would inevitably have been lost, and we with her.
Feeling like men reprieved when the noose had been tightened about our throats and the trap all but sprung, we left the poop slowly, noticing for the first time how cold we were. But in spite of that, curious to examine at still closer range the danger we had so narrowly escaped, all hands except those on watch clambered down the starboard gangway to the ice and were soon dispersed among the nearest slopes, climbing the pinnacles, gazing in awe at some of the nearer floebergs standing upended from the pack, and speculating on the results had this or that colossal berg capsized on our vessel.
On the Jeannette, five bells struck. It was 10:30 A.M., the time for serving out the daily allotment of coal for the galley, the heating stoves fore and aft, and the distillers. Regretfully I turned my back on the marvelous vista of ice peaks and canyons stretching before me, and with a frozen nose, bleary eyes, and a beard white with frost from my heavy breathing, started stiffly back to the ship. I wanted to make sure that young Sharvell, the most inexperienced of my four coalheavers, whose turn it was to break out the coal from the bunkers, was not imposed upon either by the guile of that Chinaman, Ah Sam, or the bullying of the bosun into passing out a pound more of our precious fuel than was allotted them by my orders.
I climbed the gangway, crossed the deck to the machinery hatch, and was halfway down the ice-covered iron ladder, just turning on the middle grating to descend into the fireroom, when in that darkness, as if the devil were after him, a man came bounding up the ladder, rammed me in the stomach, and nearly ricocheted me off the grating to the fireroom floor below. I saved myself only by grabbing his arm as he shot by. But to my surprise, instead of stopping, he struggled to tear loose and continue on his way. In the gloom, I peered at him. It was little Sharvell, my coalheaver, apparently badly frightened, his rolling eyeballs and pallid face startlingly white against the smudges of coal dust on his forehead. Well, I was no doubt as white, having just had my wind completely knocked out by his carelessness, and I was mad besides. I tightened my grip on him.
“You clumsy cow,” I gasped, “wait a minute there! What d’ye mean by—”
The next I knew, I was talking to myself. Sharvell, twisting free, was racing up the ladder.
Thoroughly enraged now, I shouted after him,
“Damn you! Come back here!”
But Sharvell did not come back, he kept on climbing. The thought, however, of coming back penetrated his fright enough to loosen his tongue, for he yelled down to me,