“What is wrong?” I asked.
“A stranding, Mr. Jeorling.”
“We are ashore!”
“A shore presupposes land,” replied the boatswain ironically, “and so far as land goes there was never any except in that rascal Dirk Peters’ imagination.”
“But tell me—what has happened?”
“We came upon an iceberg in the middle of the fog, and were unable to keep clear of it.”
“An iceberg, boatswain?”
“Yes, an iceberg, which has chosen just now to turn head over heels. In turning, it struck the Halbrane and carried it off just as a battledore catches a shuttlecock, and now here we are, stranded at certainly one hundred feet above the level of the Antarctic Sea.”
Could one have imagined a more terrible conclusion to the adventurous voyage of the Halbrane?
In the middle of these remote regions our only means of transport had just been snatched from its natural element, and carried off by the turn of an iceberg to a height of more than one hundred feet! What a conclusion! To be swallowed up in a polar tempest, to be destroyed in a fight with savages, to be crushed in the ice, such are the dangers to which any ship engaged in the polar seas is exposed! But to think that the Halbrane had been lifted by a floating mountain just as that mountain was turning over, was stranded and almost at its summit—no! such a thing seemed quite impossible.