The ice was bursting in every direction, and the waves seemed to boil through the yawning rents in snowy foam; vast pieces, like bergs, arose from the water, and were dashed against each other, to sink into the deep, to arise, and then be dashed together again. Add to this the darkness of the gathering night, the roar of the biting wind, and the dense murkiness caused by the hail as it swept through that mighty waste, and the reader may have an idea of the scene when I paused and looked back for my two companions.
At that moment the ice heaved beneath my feet, I was thrown forward on my face and almost stunned. There was a terrific splitting sound as the field around us broke into a thousand floes: I found myself separated from my two friends, upon a piece of ice about half a mile square, and borne away with it, despairing and alone, into the mist and darkness of the stormy night.
CHAPTER XX.
ADRIFT ON THE DEAD FLOE.
All was obscurity around me—a chaos of tumbling waves, of crashing ice and hissing hail.
I shouted wildly, fiercely, as the dying or despairing alone may shout.
A faint response seemed to come through the drift and the hail that was sowing the ice and pathless sea; but it might have been fancy, or my own cry tossed back by the mocking wind. And now from time to time I was covered by the icy spoondrift, as the water which the wind sweeps from the wave-tops is named by seamen.
For a time I felt the impossibility of realizing the actual horrors of such a situation, and murmured repeatedly—
"Oh, this cannot be reality; if so, it must soon come to an end, and I shall be dead!"
The floe on which I sat surged and rolled heavily, as it was rasped, dashed against others, and whirled round in the eddies they made. On its slippery surface I was driven hither and thither, even when seated; and at last, on finding myself among some large stones which were frozen into the snow, and which I knew to be a portion of the brig's ballast, I shuddered with instinctive dread when discovering that I was adrift on that portion of the ice in which our dead were buried, and which had lain on her starboard bow. Thus I learned that at the moment of my separation from the Abbots, I had been within half a mile of the Leda.