“We have especial reason to congratulate ourselves and each other, gentlemen, for we have to-day not only looked upon the magnificent Humboldt Glacier under most highly favourable conditions, but we have been also permitted to witness that even rarer sight, the birth of an iceberg!”
They had indeed witnessed the birth of an iceberg, and that too of quite unusual size; for, as soon as they dared, they approached the newly fallen mass of ice closely enough to make a tolerably accurate measurement of it; and they found that it was of nearly square shape, measuring fully three-quarters of a mile along each of its four sides, and towering to an average height of about three hundred and fifteen feet above the surface of the water. The visible portion of the berg constituted, however, only a small portion of its entire bulk, since fresh-water ice floating in salt water shows above the surface only one-eighth of its entire depth. This enormous berg, therefore, must have measured in its entirety about four thousand feet square by about two thousand five hundred feet deep! And its weight must have approximated closely upon two thousand millions of tons! Bergs of equal, or even greater dimensions, have occasionally been encountered in the Arctic seas; but how few of earth’s inhabitants have ever been privileged to witness the disruption of so enormous a mass from its parent glacier!
After witnessing so thrilling a spectacle as this—probably the grandest and most impressive which the Arctic regions can exhibit—it is perhaps not to be wondered at that even the beauties of the glacier itself appeared somewhat tame and uninteresting to the voyagers. But their interest was once more awakened when, having at length coasted along the face of the glacier for a distance of not less than sixty miles, they reached its northern extremity and found the succeeding Greenland coast to be magnificently picturesque, the greenstone and sandstone cliffs in some cases towering abruptly from the water’s edge to a height of a thousand feet or more, not in a smooth unbroken face, or even with the usual everyday rugged aspect of a rocky precipice, but presenting to the enraptured eye an ever-varying perspective of ruined buttresses, pinnacles, arches, and even more fantastic architectural semblances. In one spot which caused them to pause in sheer admiration, the crumbling débris at the foot of the cliff had shaped itself into the likeness of a huge causeway such as might have been constructed by one of the giants of fabulous times, leading into a deep wild rocky gorge rich in soft purple shadows, at the further edge of which rose a gigantic rock hewn by the storms of ten thousand winters into the exact similitude of a castle flanked by three lofty detached towers all bathed in the dreamy roseate haze of the evening sunshine. And, somewhat further on, they came to a single greenstone cliff the skyline of which was boldly chiselled into the likeness of the ruined ramparts of an extensive city, whilst at its northern extremity, at the edge of a deep ravine, a solitary column nearly five hundred feet high, and standing upon a base or pedestal nearly three hundred feet high, shot straight and smooth up into the deep blue of the northern sky.
Tearing themselves unwillingly away from this region of weird enchantment, the voyagers pushed onward along Kennedy and Robeson Channels, sometimes winding their way through intricate water lanes in the ice, and sometimes skimming lightly a few yards above the surface of the solid pack, until they reached the latitude of 82 degrees 30 minutes North, when the land abruptly trended away to their right and left, and they found themselves hovering over an immense field of pack-ice which extended in an unbroken mass as far northward as the eye could reach.
Up to the present, from the time of their passing Disko Island, the voyagers had seen plenty of seals and walruses, with an occasional white bear, a few Arctic foxes, a herd or two of reindeer, and even a few specimens of the elk and musk-ox, to say nothing of birds, such as snow-geese, eider and long-tailed ducks, sea-eagles, divers, auks, and gulls. Moreover, they had been favoured with, on the whole, exceptionally fine weather—due as much as anything, perhaps, to the fact that they had been fortunate enough to enter the Arctic circle during the prevalence of a “spell” of fine weather, and that they had accomplished in a very few days a distance which it would occupy an ordinary craft months of weary toil to cover. But, on passing the edge of this gigantic ice barrier, they left all life behind them; even the very gulls—which had followed them in clouds whenever the speed of the Flying Fish was low enough to permit of such a proceeding—after wheeling agitatedly about the ship for a few minutes with discordant screams, as of warning to the travellers not to venture into so vast and gloomy a solitude, forsook them and retraced their way to the southward. The weather, too, changed, the sky becoming overcast with a pall of dull grey snow—laden cloud accompanied by a dismal murky atmosphere and a temperature of ten degrees below zero. The wind sighed and moaned over the icy waste; but, excepting for this dreary and depressing sound, there was absolute silence, the silence of a dead world.
The ice bore at first the same appearance as all the other ice which they had hitherto encountered, but by the time that they had advanced a distance of thirty miles into the frozen desert they became conscious of a change. The hummocks were not so lofty as heretofore, the hollows between them having the appearance of being to a considerable extent filled up with hard frozen snow; the ice itself, too, instead of being a pure white, was tinged with yellow of the hue of very old ivory; the sharp angles, also, were all worn away as if by long-continued abrasion; the ice, in fact, bore unmistakable evidence of extreme age.
At the professor’s suggestion a pause was made and a descent effected, in order that he might carefully investigate the nature of the ice; and, warmly clad in furs, the entire party left the ship for this purpose.
“It is as I feared,” said von Schalckenberg, after they had toiled painfully over the surface for some time; “we have reached the region of paleocrystic or ancient ice; and my cherished theory of an open sea about the North Pole vanishes into thin air. Look at this ice here, where a portion of the original hummock still remains bare—it is yellow and rotten, not with the rottenness which precedes a thaw, but with extreme age. See, it crumbles at a kick or a blow, but the fragments do not melt; it is years—possibly ages—since this ice was water. And look at the edges of the blocks; they are rounded and worn away by the constant abrading action of the wind, the snow, the hail, and possibly the rain, which has beaten upon them through unnumbered years. It is no wonder that this is a lifeless solitude; there is nothing here capable of sustaining the life of even the meanest insect. Let us return to the ship, my friends, and hasten over this part of our journey; we shall meet with nothing worthy of interest until we reach the Pole, which itself will probably prove to be merely an undistinguishable spot in just such a waste as this.”
The professor was, however mistaken; a most interesting discovery awaited them at no very great distance ahead. They returned to the ship oppressed with a vague feeling of melancholy foreboding for which they could not account, but which was doubtless attributable to the gloomy cheerless aspect of their surroundings, and, releasing the ship from the hold of her grip-anchors, resumed their way northward at the Flying Fish’s utmost speed.
Half an hour later, however, they suddenly checked their flight and diverged a mile to the eastward of their former course to examine an object which Mildmay’s quick eye had detected. The object—or objects rather, for there were two of them—proved to be short poles or spars about twenty-five feet apart, projecting about twelve feet out of the ice, and surmounted by the skeleton framework of what seemed to have been at one time small bulwarked platforms. Wondering what they could possibly be, and by whom placed in so out-of-the-way a region, but thinking they might possibly mark cairns or places of deposit inclosing the records of some long-lost expedition, they resolved to stop and institute a thorough examination.