There was agony in this now useless conviction!
"Am I to find a grave here, after all?" was my thought.
If I could live till dawn, the crew of the Leda (if she, too, survived the night) might see and save me; but who could live on an ice-floe through so many freezing hours?
After a time the wind lulled, the hail ceased, the clouds were divided in heaven, and a star or two shone in its blue vault. The ice-blocks ceased to crash against the floe, thus its motion became steadier, and under the lee of a hummock, I endeavoured to keep myself as warm as my upper garments, which were entirely composed of seal-skins, would enable me.
The moon was rising, and its fitful light added to the chaotic terrors of the scene around me. To be alone—alone upon a floe at midnight, with the open sea rolling around me! All seemed over with me now. I felt that my sufferings could not last long, as I should certainly pass away in the heavy slumber of those who perish by exhaustion and intensity of cold. In spite of this horrible thought, I gradually became torpid.
I had been, perhaps, an hour in this situation, when I seemed suddenly to start to life, as a bank of vapour close by parted like a crape curtain, and the moonbeams fell upon the white canvas of a vessel. She was a brig—she was the Leda, under weigh, and distant from the floe not more than one hundred yards!
She was under sail, with her foreyards aback to deaden her way, as she was rasping along a lee of ice-floes and brash, as the smaller fragments are technically named. The weather had now become so calm, that her canvas, which glittered white as snow in the moonshine, was almost, as the sailors say, asleep, there being just sufficient wind to keep it from waking.
I endeavoured to shout, but my tongue was paralysed as if in a nightmare; sobs only came from my heart, and I thought all sense would leave me, as the brig, like a spectre, came slowly gliding past. Again and again I endeavoured to hail her, but in vain.
I rushed to the edge of the floe, at the risk of slipping off it into the sea. Then a faint shout reached my ear, and made my heart throb with joy. Those on deck could not hear my voice, but they had seen my figure in the moonlight; and in a few minutes I beheld a boat shoved off from her, and heard the cheerful voice of old Hans Peterkin, crying with his Orkney patois—
"Quick, my lads—lay out on your oars!" as they pulled through the rack and drift towards me.