Late in the afternoon, and the breeze gone down. We are off on the gentle rollers of the Bay of St. Louis, after a low, broad iceberg, covering, say, an acre of surface, and grounded in forty fathoms of water. It has upon one extremity a bulky tower of sixty feet, on the other, forty, and in the middle a huge pile of ice blocks of all shapes and sizes, the ruins of some spire. While the outside of this heap of fragments is white, with tints of green, touched here and there with what seems to be the most delicate bronze and gilding; every crevice, where there is a shadow lurking, is a blue, the purity and softness of which cannot be described nor easily imagined. To one who has any feeling for color, it has a sentiment as sweet as any thing in all visible nature. A pure, white surface, like this fine opaque ice, seen through deep shade produces blue, and such a blue as one sees in the stainless sky when it is full of warmth and light. It is quite beyond the rarest ultramarine of the painter. The lovely azure appears to pervade and fill the hollows like so much visible atmosphere or smoke. One almost looks to see it float out of the crystal cells where it reposes, and thin away into colorless air.
We have just been honored by a royal salute from the walls of the alabaster fortress. Our kind angels will keep us at a safer distance than we are disposed to keep ourselves. A projecting table has fallen with that peculiarly startling crack, quick as lightning and loud as thunder. It seems impossible for my nerves to become accustomed to the shock. I tremble, in spite of myself, as one does after a fright. The explosion unquestionably has the voice of the earthquake and volcano. To my surprise, I find myself with cold feet and headache—those unfailing symptoms of sea-sickness. By the painful expression of his face, I suspect the painter is even worse off than myself. It is impossible to avoid feeling both vexed and amused at this companionship in misery. In his case, the climax has been attained. Laying down box and brushes with uncommon emphasis, he made a rapid movement to the edge of the boat, and looked over at his own image reflected in the glassy, oily-rolling swell, with loud and violent demonstrations of disagreement with himself. After this unhappy outbreak, he wiped away the tears, and returned subdued and composed to the gentler employment of the paint-box.
It is nearly nine o’clock in the evening, with the downiest clouds dropped around the retiring sun. What light must be behind them to fill them with such wealth of color, and dye their front with such rich and varied red! The very waves below bloom with a crimson splendor. C—— has finished his pictures, and we row around the berg, a singularly irregular one, both above and below the surface. The surrounding water, to the eye nearly black, is irradiated, star-like, with tracts of the clear, tender green. The effect upon us is indescribably fine. I think of deep down caverns of light shining up through the dark sea. The blocks and bowlders, wrecks of former towers, which lie scattered and in heaps upon the main berg, are like the purest alabaster on their outer and upper sides, but of that heavenly azure in their fissures and spaces, although wrapped in the one great shade of evening. We now pause at the corner of the ice, and look down both its northern and western fronts; the upper stories, to all appearance, in rough marble—the lower, polished as a mirror. Almost over us, a Greek-like figure-head, sculptured from shining crystal, gazes with serene majesty upon the white daylight in the northwest. Possessed with the mournful and nearly supernatural beauty, we forget the dangers of this intimacy. There is a strange fascination, and particularly at this hour, that draws like the fabulous music of the Sirens. We are headed homeward, riding silently over the glassy waves. The surf rings in the hollows of the iceberg, and sounds upon the shores like the last blows of the weary day.
CHAPTER XLIV.
CAPE ST. CHARLES.—THE RIP VAN WINKLE BERG.—THE GREAT CASTLE BERG.—STUDIES OF ITS DIFFERENT FRONTS.
Thursday, July 14. Off again for the Great Castle Berg. The passage from Battle Harbor into the south waters is a shallow, rocky lane, and furnishes very rare studies of color in stone. A large agate cut across would serve the painter very well as a sample of much that is seen here along the rough margin of this little strait. Wave-washed, and sparkling with mica and crystallizations, and tinged with green and yellow mosses soft as plush, the rocks are frequently very beautiful. Foremost along the coast, reaching southwest into the straits of Belle Isle, is Cape St. Charles, a brown promontory, rising, as it recedes from the sea, into rocky hills tinged with a pale green, the moss-pastures of the reindeer. Beyond the cape is a bay with mountain shores, not unlike those of Lake George. The fine smoke-like shadow along their sides is dappled with olive-green and yellowish tracts of moss and shrubbery. The annual expenditure of nature, on those poor mountains, for clothing and decoration is very small. She furnishes holiday suits of cheap and flimsy cloud, and the showy jewelry of the passing showers, but refuses any bounteous outlay for the rich and sumptuous apparel of green fields and forests. Beneath those sunny but desolate heights, there slumbers, in the purple, calm waters, an iceberg with a form and expression that harmonize with the landscape. I would call it the Rip Van Winkle iceberg. It seems to have been lying down, but now to be half up, reposing upon its elbow. Its head, recently pillowed on the drowsy swells, wears a shapeless, peaked hat, from the tip of which is dropping silvery rain through the warm, dreamy air. Between the calm and the currents, our oarsmen are having a warm time of it. I lay hold and labor until my hands smart, and I feel that hot weather has come at last to Labrador.
PLATE No. 5.
ICEBERG IN THE MORNING MIST.—WHALEBOAT
Lith. of Sarony Major & Knapp, 449 Broadway NY.
We rest in front of the Great Castle Berg, the grand capitol of the city of icebergs now in the waters of Belle Isle, and, if I except the Windsor Castle Berg which we saw founder, the largest we have seen, and, what is most likely, the largest we ever shall see. We merely guess at the dimensions. Sailing up the Niagara in the little steamer, how wide should you judge the falls to be from Table Rock across to the horse-shoe tower? I judge this ice-front to be two-thirds that width, and quite as high, if not higher, than the cataract. If this were floated up into that grand bend of Niagara, I think it would fill a large part of it very handsomely, with a tower rising sufficiently above the brink of the fall to be seen from the edge of the river for some distance above. Imagine the main sheet, reaching from Table Rock toward the Horseshoe, to be silent ice, and you will have no very wrong notion of the ice before us at this moment. I do not mean to say that it has the bend of the great cataract, for it is on this side quite devoid of flowing lines, and abounds with the perpendicular and horizontal for about fifty feet from the water, when the long and very level lines begin to be crossed by a fluted surface, resembling the folds of carefully arranged drapery hanging gracefully from the serrated line at the top. No other side will present this view at all. Change of position gives an iceberg almost as many appearances as a cumulous cloud assumes at sunset in the summer sky.