“I hope,” he said, “to give you an opportunity of discovering for yourself, my dear boy.”
But the Walrus reached the pack of sea-ice at last; and the sight, though not perfectly new to mariners who had sailed the Arctic seas, was at least very wonderful, and had a cold kind of beauty about it, which it is difficult indeed to describe.
And far, far away in the interior, mountains covered with everlasting snow raised their great peaked heads on the horizon.
No life?
Well, no animals, not even a leopard, seal, or sea-elephant, but droves of droll penguins, standing on end, and looking, at a distance, for all the world like a crowd of lazy boys just let loose from a Sunday school, who had been warned not to soil their clothes by romping.
CHAPTER VIII
WONDROUS SCENERY—NICK SAVES THE LIFE OF WALLACE
The hummocks in this pack were not like those in Greenland seas, which are generally rounded off by wind and snow. These were more like pieces of ice set on end, and were of every conceivable shape or form.
But not far away from the sea-edge was a most gigantic fellow of a land-iceberg. It was quite as large as five and forty St. Paul’s Cathedrals formed into one. Peaked here and there it was too, and the outlines of these peaks were rounded off with snow.
It was evident that this magical monster had been to sea a time or two, and that, moreover, he would go north again on the first chance, quickly dashing aside the pigmies that now impeded his progress, forced along by wind and current.
The Walrus lay-to off the pack-edge for a day or two, that observations, soundings, and a survey of the sea’s bottom, etc., might be taken. For Mayne Brace did not mean to work through at present, and risk the chance of being beset.