The mass of ambergris in the dory seriously interfered with their movements, and left room for only one of them to row at a time. At last, when they had rowed thus for several hours--though in this region of perpetual daylight they had no means of knowing what time it was--Breeze, tired, hungry, and discouraged, pulled in his oars, and exclaimed,
“I’ve a great mind to heave that stuff overboard, and I wish with all my heart that we’d never set eyes on it. The idea of its getting us into such a scrape!”
In saying this, Breeze was only dropping into the fault, so common to us all, of trying to lay the blame of his own wrong action upon somebody or something else; but Nimbus was wiser in this respect than his young companion.
“No, no!” he said. “De amble grease all right. He don’ do nuffin. Now we got um, we keep um. Bimeby be berry glad ob um. Now let ole Nim row.”
“I don’t care,” replied Breeze, changing places with the negro. “I’d give the whole of it this minute for a loaf of bread. I don’t believe I ever was so hungry in my life.”
“Bimeby we get um bread,” said Nimbus, encouragingly, as he took the oars, “an’ hab um amble grease too.”
For an hour or two longer the dory was urged forward by the powerful, steady strokes of the black man, who seemed never to tire or to grow impatient at their hard fate.
At length Breeze exclaimed, “There’s land, Nimbus; I see it!”
Nimbus, turning, saw it too--a long black line of coast; and beyond it, rising dimly through the mist-laden atmosphere, the huge forms of the snow Jökulls. An hour later they were close enough to it to distinguish the features of the forbidding-looking cliffs, pierced by deep fiords, and to begin to consider which of these they should enter.
As they talked the matter over in low tones, awed by the impressiveness of the scene, and the unbroken stillness that brooded over it, Nimbus suddenly raised a warning hand, and his great ears seemed to prick forward with the intentness of listening. He leaned over the side of the dory until one of his ears was close to the water, and when he again raised his head he said, “You hear um steamboat?”