"Well, that was the last of the 'Mary Jane.' The mate, Jack Cosgrove, and myself were all that escaped out of a crew of eleven. We managed to climb upon a small shelf of ice, just above the water, where we would have perished with cold had not an Esquimau fisherman, named Docak, seen us. We were nearer the mainland than we dared hope, and he came out in his kayak and took us off. He helped us to make our way to Ivignut, where the cryolite mines are, and thence we got back to England by way of Denmark. No," added Captain McAlpine, "a prudent navigator won't try to butt an iceberg out of his path; it don't pay."
"It must be dangerous in these waters, especially at night."
"There is danger everywhere and at all times in this life," was the truthful remark of the commander; "and you know that the most constant watchfulness on the part of the great steamers cannot always avert disaster, but I have little fear of anything from icebergs."
You need to be told little about those mountains of ice which sometimes form a procession, vast, towering, and awful, that stream down from the far North and sail in all their sublime grandeur steadily southward until they "go out of commission" forever in the tepid waters of the tropic regions.
It is a strange spectacle to see one of them moving resistlessly against the current, which is sometimes dashed from the corrugated front, as is seen at the bow of a steamboat, but the reason is simple. Nearly seven-eighths of an iceberg is under water, extending so far down that most of the bulk is often within the embrace of the counter current below. This, of course, carries it against the weaker flow, and causes many people to wonder how it can be thus.
While the little group stood forward talking of icebergs, they were gradually drawing near the couple that had first caught their attention. By this time a third had risen to sight, more to the westward, but it was much smaller than the other two, though more unique and beautiful. It looked for all the world like a grand cathedral, whose tapering spire towered fully two hundred feet in air. It was easy to imagine that some gigantic structure had been submerged by a flood, while the steeple still reared its head above the surrounding waters as though defying them to do their worst.
The other two bergs were much more enormous and of irregular contour. The imaginative spectator could fancy all kinds of resemblances, but the "cold fact" remained that they were simply mountains of ice, with no more symmetry of outline than a mass of rock blasted from a quarry.
"I have read," said Fred, "that in the iceberg factories of the north, as they are called, they are sometimes two or three years in forming, before they break loose and sweep off into the ocean."
"That is true," added Captain McAlpine; "an iceberg is simply a chunk off a frozen river, and a pretty good-sized one, it must be admitted. Where the cold is so intense, a river becomes frozen from the surface to the ground. Snow falls, there may be a little rain during the moderate season, then snow comes again, and all the time the water beneath is freezing more and more solid. Gravity and the pressure of the inconceivable weight beyond keeps forcing the bulk of ice and snow nearer the ocean, until it projects into the clear sea. By and by it breaks loose, and off it goes."
"But why does it take so long?"