We reached them on the 16th. Mr. Murdaugh, and myself, and four men, and three bottles of rum, were dispatched to communicate with the shore. As we rowed in to the landing-place, the great dikes of injected syenite stood out red and warm against the cold gray gneiss, and the moss gullies met us like familiar grass-plots. Esquimaux crowded the rocks, and dogs barked, and children yelled. A few lusty pulls, and after nine months of drift, and toil, and scurvy, we were once more on terra firma.
God forgive me the revulsion of unthankfulness! I ought to have dilated with gratitude for my lot.
Winter had been severe. The season lagged. The birds had not yet begun to breed. Faces were worn, and forms bent. Every body was coughing. In one hut, a summer lodge of reindeer and seal skins, was a dead child. It was many months since I had looked at a corpse. The poor little thing had been for once washed clean, and looked cheerful. The father leaned over it weeping, for it was a boy; and two little sisters were making lamentation in a most natural and savage way.
I gave the corpse a string of blue beads, and bought a pair of seal-skin boots for twenty-five cents; and we rowed back to the brig. In a very little while we were under sail for Godhaven.
We were but five days recruiting at Godhaven. It was a shorter stay than we had expected; but we were all of us too anxious to regain the searching ground to complain. We made the most of it, of course. We ate inordinately of eider, and codfish, and seal, to say nothing of a hideous-looking toad fish, a Lepodogaster, that insisted on patronizing our pork-baited lines; chewed bitter herbs, too, of every sort we could get; drank largely of the smallest of small-beer; and danced with the natives, teaching them the polka, and learning the pee-oo-too-ka in return. But on the 22d, by six o’clock in the morning, we were working our way again to the north.
We passed the hills of Disco in review, with their terraced summits, simulating the Ghauts of Hindostan; the green-stone cliffs round Omenak’s Fiord, the great dockyard of bergs; and Cape Cranstoun, around which they were clustered like a fleet waiting for convoy. They were of majestic proportions; and as we wound our way tortuously among them, one after another would come into the field of view, like a temple set to be the terminus of a vista. At one time we had the whole Acropolis looking down upon us in silver; at another, our Philadelphia copy of the Parthenon, the monumental Bank of the United States, stood out alone. Then, again, some venerable cathedral, with its deep vaults and hoary belfries, would spread itself across the sky; or perhaps some wild combination of architectural impossibilities.
AN ICE CATHEDRAL.
THE GROTTO IN THE BERG.