On one side are miles on miles of violet ocean sweeping away into limitless space, a fleck of sunlight flashing like a fire-fly in every hollowed wave; on the other, miles on miles of glistening ice, crowned by peaks of softest snow.
At sunset warm purple mists drift in and settle over the glacier; above these float banks of deepest rose; through both, and above them, glimmer the mountains pearlily, in a remote loveliness that seems not of earth.
But by moonlight to see the glacier streaming down from the mountains and out into the ocean, into the midnight—silent, opaline, majestic—is worth ten years of dull, ordinary living.
It is as if the very face of God shone through the silence and the sublimity of the night.
CHAPTER XXI
There is an open roadstead at Yaktag, or Yakataga. The ship anchors several miles from shore—when the fierce storms which prevail in this vicinity will permit it to anchor at all—and passengers and freight are lightered ashore.
I have seen horses hoisted from the deck in their wooden cages and dropped into the sea, where they were liberated. After their first frightened, furious plunges, they headed for the shore, and started out bravely on their long swim. The surf was running high, and for a time it seemed that they could not escape being dashed upon the rocks; but with unerring instinct, they struggled away from one rocky place after another until they reached a strip of smooth sand up which they were borne by the breaking sea, and where they fell for a few moments, exhausted. Then they arose, staggered, threw up their heads and ran as I have never seen horses run—with such wildness, such gladness, such utterance of the joy of freedom in the fling of their legs, in the streaming of mane and tail.
They had been penned in a narrow stall under the forward deck for twelve days; they had been battered by the storms and unable to lie down and rest; they had been plunged from this condition unexpectedly into the ocean and compelled to strike out on a long swim for their lives.