See there yon dismal ice-blocked shore, with the jagged mountains in the background, their snowy peaks rising high into the sky. Screeching sea-birds—fulmars, gulls, guillemots, auks—mix their hoarse voices with the melancholy tones of the breakers and the winds, and between them all resounds, from time to time, the bellowing of the walrus or the roar of the polar bear.
The weak rays of the sun, just dipping over the horizon, have called forth these symptoms of life; but as soon as the great luminary disappears, animal creation becomes mute, and the voices of the air and ocean are again the only sounds which break the silence of the arctic night.
The crystal mass floats along, buried in deep darkness; but soon a new and wondrous sight is seen, for the flaming swords of the northern light flit through the heavens, casting a magic gleam, here on the desert shore, there on the dark bosom of the sea.
Advancing farther and farther to the south, the iceberg loses one after another the witnesses of its first migrations, and wasting more and more, at length entirely merges in the tepid Gulf Stream. The enthralled waters are now all liberated, but many on their western passage are again diverted to the north, and the others reach, only after a long circuit, the mighty equatorial stream, which carries them along, through the torrid ocean, from one hemisphere to the other.
SPERM WHALE.
The animal life they meet with in these sunny regions is very different from that which witnessed their passage through the higher latitudes.
The large whalebone whale, the rorqual and narwhal of the north, have disappeared, but pods of the mighty sperm whale rapidly traverse the equatorial seas.
The birds also exhibit new types of being. The royal albatross avoids the torrid zone, but the high-soaring frigate-bird hovers over the waters, where it is seen darting upon the flying-fish, and, like the skua gull of the north, attacking the weaker sea-birds in order to make them disgorge their prey.
