The waves are crisp with a snowy mane, and the rocky shores of Twillingate are draped with splendid lights and shadows. While the seams and surfaces of the cliffs are strikingly plain in the sunlight, they are dark as caverns in the shade. This gives the coast a wonderfully broken, wild, and picturesque look.
Once more the sea “is all before us where to choose.” The joy of this freedom is utterly inexpressible, although, in consideration of the day, we—we Yankees—occasionally hurra right heartily. But no words can do justice to the delightful emotions of moments such as these. “Messmates, hear a brother sailor sing the dangers of the sea,” runs the old song. None that I have ever heard or read express at all the real pleasure of its freedom. The freedom of the seas! If any great city council would do a man of feeling a noble pleasure, let them vote him that.
A lonely isle of crystalline brightness, all the way from Melville Bay, most likely, gleams in the north-east. Pale and solitary, like some marble mausoleum, the iceberg of Twillingate stands off in the southern waters. After all, how feeble is man in the presence of these arctic wonders! With all his skill, intelligence and power, he passes, either on the sunny or the shady side, closely at his peril, only in safety at a distance too great to satisfy his curiosity, and gazes at their greatness and their splendor, and thinks and feels, records his thoughts and feelings, draws their figure and paints their complexion, but may no more lay his hand upon them than the Jew of old might lay his hand upon the ark of the covenant. He may do it and live, do it twice or thrice, and then he may perish for his temerity. There now reposes, amid the currents and billows of the ocean, the huge, polar structure, which has been to us an object of the liveliest interest and wonder; its bright foundations fifty fathoms in the deep; an erection suggestive of the skill and strength of the Creator; with a mystery enveloping its story, its conception, birth and growth, its native land, the hour of its departure, its strange and labyrinthine voyage. While the body of this building-of-the-elements sleeps below, and only its gables and towers glow and melt in the brightness of these summer days, yet is it as dissolvable as the clouds from which it originally fell. It is but the clouds condensed and crystallized. A column of vapor, mainly invisible, perpetually ascends into its native heavens, while the atmosphere, and the warm, briny currents melt and wear, at every imaginable point of the vast surface. Pass a few sunny weeks, and all will be melted, and, like a snow-flake, lost in the immensity of waters.
Still the flags wave above. We fill our glasses with iceberg-water, and drink with cheers to the Queen and President. As the breeze dies away in the long, long afternoon, and we roll lazily on the glassy swells, the painter and I, the poorest of sailors, lapse into sea-sickness, and go below.
CHAPTER XXVI.
GULL ISLAND.—THE ICEBERGS OF CAPE ST. JOHN.
Tuesday, July 5. Off Cape St. John, with fog and head winds. We are weary of this fruitless beating about, and resolve to put into smooth water for the sake of relief from sea-sickness. While our English guests seem to enjoy the breakfast, we have gone no further than to sip a little tea, take a few turns on deck in the chilly morning air, and return to the cabin, where I pencil these notes.
There is a dome-shaped berg before us in the mist, but not of sufficient beauty in the dull gray atmosphere to attract attention. Exclamations of our friends on deck have brought me up to look at the ice as we pass it, distant, it may be, five hundred yards. It bears a strange resemblance to a balloon lying on its side in a collapsed condition. It has recently undergone some heavy disruptions, and rolled so far over as to bring its late water-line, a deep and polished fissure, nearly across the top of it.
There is a promise of clear weather. The clouds, to our delight, are breaking, and giving us peeps of the sunny azure far above. The Cape is in full view, a promontory of shaggy precipices, suggestive of all the fiends of Pandemonium, rather than the lovely Apostle, whose name has been gibbeted on the black and dismal crags. The salt of that saintly name cannot save it. Nay, it is better fitted to spoil the saint. Cape St. John! Better, Cape “Moloch, Horrid King,” or some other demon of those that figure in the dark Miltonic scenes. It is terribly awful and impressive. Our lamb, poor innocent, seems to feel lonely under the frown of a coast so inhospitable and savage, and comes bleating around us as if for sympathy. The wind is cold and bracing, sweeping alike the sea and the sky of all fog and clouds, and driving us to heavy winter clothing.
As we bear down toward the Cape, we pass Gull Isle, a mere pile of naked rocks delicately wreathed with lace-like mists. Imagine the last hundred feet of Corway Peak, the very finest of the New Hampshire mountain tops, pricking above the waves, and you will see this little outpost and breakwater of Cape St. John. All things have their uses. Even this bone of the earth, picked of all vegetable growth and beauty, and flung into the deep, has the marrow of goodness in it to a degree that invites a multitude of God’s fair creatures to make it their estate and dwelling-place. Gulls with cimetar-like pinions, cut and slash the air in all directions. Pretty little sea-pigeons fly to and fro, flying off with whistling wings in straight lines, and flying back, full of news, and full of alarm.