A moment more, and he felt himself tumbled in on the heap of sails. Hour after hour, he lay comfortably there. He could hear the straining of the masts, the creaking of the boom, and the singing of the ropes with the roaring of the wind; also the surge of the waves past the ship's sides and the thud with which every now and then one would strike her.
All at once arose a terrible uproar. The cover was blown off again, a fierce wind rushed in, snatched him up and bore him aloft into the clouds. Down below, he saw the little vessel, he had been in, tossing on the waves like a sea-bird with folded wing. Near it was a bigger ship which was on its way to the north pole.
"That big ship will give us a lift now," said North Wind. Swooping down she tucked him snugly in amongst some flags. And now on and on, they sped toward the north. How long it was, Diamond did not know, but one night she whispered in his ear, "Come up on deck, Diamond."
Everything looked very strange. Here and there on all sides, were huge masses of floating ice looking like cathedrals and castles and crags, and beyond them a blue sea. Some of the icebergs were drifting northward, one passing very near the ship. North Wind seized Diamond and with a single bound, lighted on it. The same instant, South Wind began to blow and North Wind hurried Diamond down the north side of the berg and into a cave. There she sat down as if weary on a ledge of ice.
Diamond was enraptured with the color of the air in the cave, a deep, dazzling, lovely blue that was always in motion, boiling and sparkling. But when he looked at North Wind he was frightened.
He saw that her form and face were growing, not small, but transparent like something dissolving away. He could see the side of the blue cave through her very heart. She melted slowly away till all that was left was a pale face with two great lucid eyes in it.
"She is dying away!" he said. "Of course, as we go northward, she is dying away more and more."
After a little, he went out and sat on the edge of his floating island and looked down into the green ocean. When he got tired of that, he went back into the blue cave. He felt as if in a dream. He was not hungry, but he sucked little bits of the berg at times.
At length, far off on the horizon, there rose into the sky a shining peak, and his berg floated right toward it. Other peaks came into view as he went on, and at last his berg floated up to a projecting rock. Diamond stepped ashore and a little way before him saw a lofty ridge of ice with a gap in it like the opening of a valley. As he got nearer, he saw it was not a gap but the form of a woman, her hands in her lap and her hair hanging to the ground.
"It is North Wind on her door-step!" said Diamond joyfully and hurried on.