This one—this vast “gomeril” of ice and snow—might well have been taken for an island at first sight. For it was fully a mile in length, presenting to the astonished eyes of the Walrus’s people a long, glittering wall of blue and violet fully two hundred feet in height. The white hummocks towered far back and above the cold cliff edge. At one side it shelved slowly down towards the sea-level in a long cape, or tongue, and upon this, if anywhere, it would be possible to land.
When the Walrus had ventured so near that the hills above disappeared, and only the gleaming sides were visible, glittering in the spring sunshine, an order was given to stop ship, and not one whaler only, but two, were called away to “board” the mysterious iceberg, as the spectioneer phrased it.
The sea was very calm and blue, and only a longwaved swell was visible on its clear surface, a swell which, when it rushed into the caves and broke into foam in the darkness, elicited ever and anon a longdrawn moan or roar—a deep diapason, in fact, a musical blending of every note of an octave, from this mighty organ on which Father Neptune himself was playing and to which he sang.
This marvellous sea-song, however, melted away almost into silence as the boats reached the outlying tongue of ice on which they were to be drawn up.
It must not be supposed that the scene presented to our heroes, as they were being rowed towards the island-iceberg, was one of desolation.
The sun above them was shining to-day with unusual splendour and glittering on the ocean, which was a beautiful study in brightest blue and silver. High in the air circled and screamed flocks of beautiful sea-gulls, among which were cormorants and skuas, and many a bird resembling those to be met with in the far-off regions around the Northern pole.
Away to the eastward a whale had revealed his black back and head, and the steam from his blowholes rose like fountains into the sky. Farther off was another, and many strange seals raised their shoulders high above the water, to gaze with liquid eyes resplendent, and wonder who or what they might be that were thus invading their lonely and silent domains.
Some of these very seals—chiefly sea-leopards they were—had landed on the ice-foot to slumber in the sunshine.
As the first boat, which contained Ingomar and our boys, swept round towards the landing-place, they noticed to their astonishment that the whole brae-side of the monster berg was covered with what at first sight appeared to be a crowd of daintily dressed schoolboys in long black coats, orange neckties, black caps, and waistcoats of dazzling white. These were all in motion, and were bobbing and bowing to each other or shaking hands as they moved about for all the world like people in a garden-party.
Only these were not people, but king penguins. They are just about the drollest birds, taking them all round, that there are on the surface of the earth or on the face of the waters thereof.