[CHAPTER XVIII]
In Which Discretion Urges Doctor Luke to Lie Still in a Pool of Water
It was a mean light—this intermittent moonlight: with the clouds slow and thick, and the ominous bank of black cloud rising all the while from the horizon. A man should go slow in a light like that! But Doctor Luke and Billy Topsail must make haste. And by and by they caught ear of the sea breaking under the wind beyond the Little Spotted Horse. They were nearing the limits of the ice. In full moonlight the whitecaps flashed news of a tumultuous open. A rumble and splash of breakers came down with the gale from the point of the island. It indicated that the sea was working in the passage between the Spotted Horses and Blow-me-Down Dick of the Ragged Run coast. The waves would run under the ice—would lift it and break it. In this way the sea would eat its way through the passage. It would destroy the young ice. It would break the pans to pieces and rub them to slush.
Doctor Luke and Billy Topsail must make the Little Spotted Horse and cross the passage between the island and the Ragged Run coast.
"Come on!" said the Doctor again.
Whatever the issue of haste, they must carry on and make the best of a bad job. Otherwise they would come to Tickle-my-Ribs, between the Little Spotted Horse and Blow-me-Down Dick of Ragged Run, and be marooned from the mainshore. And there was another reason. It was immediate and desperately urgent. As the sea was biting off the ice in Tickle-my-Ribs so too it was encroaching upon the body of the ice in Anxious Bight.
Anxious Bight was breaking up. The scale of its dissolution was gigantic. Acres of ice were wrenched from the field at a time and then broken up by the sea. What was the direction of this swift melting? It might take any direction. And a survey of the sky troubled Doctor Luke no less than Billy Topsail. All this while the light had diminished. It was failing still. It was failing faster. There was less of the moon. By and by it would be wholly obscured.
"If we're delayed," Doctor Luke declared, "we'll be caught by the dark."