None too soon.
The blood spouts high as if from a fire-hose, but in awful jets, with every throb of the giant's heart. There is life in him yet, and while the red-drenched seamen pull well out of the way, he lashes the ocean's surface with his tremendous tail, one blow from which would stave in a torpedo-boat.
The sound would be heard miles and miles away, were there anyone to listen to it in these lonesome seas, and--so dies the leviathan.
The ship gets alongside and bends on her hooks in good time, and while the body is still hot and steaming, blubber and skin are hoisted up and up towards the yard-arms, till with its weight the vessel lists and lists, and it seems as if she would be on her beam-ends.
Long before the crew is done taking on board all that is valuable, the sharks have assembled, and are fighting and splashing as they gorge on their awful feast.
And when the decks are all clean once more, and the sails again filled, supper is had fore and aft, and then, but not till then, does Skipper Talbot order the steward to splice the main-brace.
CHAPTER VII.--"HERE'S TO THE LOVED ONES AT HOME."
Captain Talbot was a brave man, but the ice for the present looked far too dangerous to venture in through. So he kept "dodging" along the great barrier-edge or cruising eastwards, and away towards what is known as Enderby Land.
Sometimes he encountered a storm, brief but terrible, and dangerous in the extreme. They saw around them great bergs coming into collision, their green, towering, wall-like sides dashed together by the force of wind and waves; heard the thunder of the encounter, and witnessed the mist and foam as they fell to pieces in a chaos of boiling surf.
At times dense fog would envelop the whole sea, and then sail had to be taken in, for the icebergs went floating past and past like mysterious ghosts.