The ships were all safe enough as yet, and there was only perceptible the gentlest heaving motion in the pack. Sufficient was it, however, to break up the bay ice between the bergs, and this with a series of loud reports, which could be heard in every direction. McBain looked overboard somewhat anxiously; the broken pieces of bay ice were getting ploughed up against the ship’s side with a noise that is indescribable, not so much from its extreme loudness as from its peculiarity; it was a strange mixture of a hundred different noises, a wailing, complaining, shrieking, grinding noise, mingled with a series of sharp, irregular reports.
“It is like nothing earthly,” said Rory, “that ever I heard before; and when I close my eyes for a brace of seconds, I could imagine that down on the pack there two hundred tom-cats had lain down to die, that twenty Highland bag-pipers—twenty Peters—were playing pibrochs of lament, and that just forenenst them a squad of militia-men was firing a feu-de-joie, and that neither the militia-men nor the pipers either were as self-contained as they should be on so solemn an occasion.”
The doctor was musing; he was thinking how happy he had been half an hour ago, and now—heigho; it was just possible he would never get back to Iceland again, never see his blue-eyed Danish maiden more.
“Pleasures,” he cried, “pleasures, Captain McBain—”
“Yes,” said McBain, “pleasures—”
“Pleasures,” continued the doctor,—
“‘Are like poppies shed,
You seize the flower, the bloom is fled.’
“I’ll gang doon below. Bed is the best place.”
“Perhaps,” said McBain, smiling, “but not the safest. Mind, the ship is in the nips, and a berg might go through her at any moment. There is the merest possibility of your being killed in your bed. That’s all; but that won’t keep you on deck.”
Mischievous Rory was doing ridiculous attitudes close behind the worthy surgeon.