CHAPTER XVI HORN BLUFF AND PENGUIN POINT
by C. T. MADIGAN
What thrill of grandeur ours
When first we viewed the column'd fell!
What idle, lilting verse can tell
Of giant fluted towers,
O'er-canopied with immemorial snow
And riven by a glacier's azure flow?
As we neared Horn Bluff, on the first stage of our homeward march, the upper layers of snow were observed to disappear, and the underlying ice became thinner; in corrugated sapphire plains with blue reaches of sparkling water. Cracks bridged with flimsy snow continually let one through into the water. McLean and I both soaked our feet and once I was immersed to the thighs, having to stop and put on dry socks and finnesko. It was a chilly process allowing the trousers to dry on me.
The mountain, pushing out as a great promontory from the coast amid the fast sea-ice, towered up higher as our sledge approached its foot. A great shadow was cast on the ice, and, when more than a mile away, we left the warm sunshine.
Awed and amazed, we beheld the lone vastness of it all and were mute. Rising out of the flat wilderness over which we had travelled was a mammoth vertical barrier of rock rearing its head to the skies above. The whole face for five miles was one magnificent series of organ-pipes. The deep shade was heightened by the icy glare beyond it. Here was indeed a Cathedral of Nature, where the "still, small voice" spoke amid an ineffable calm.
Far up the face of the cliff snow petrels fluttered like white butterflies. It was stirring to think that these majestic heights had gazed out across the wastes of snow and ice for countless ages, and never before had the voices of human beings echoed in the great stillness nor human eyes surveyed the wondrous scene.
From the base of the organ-pipes sloped a mass of debris; broken blocks of rock of every size tumbling steeply to the splintered hummocks of the sea-ice.
Standing out from the top of this talus-slope were several white "beacons," up to which we scrambled when the tent was pitched. This was a tedious task as the stones were ready to slide down at the least touch, and often we were carried down several yards by a general movement. Wearing soft finnesko, we ran the risk of getting a crushed foot among the large boulders. Amongst the rubble were beds of clay, and streams of thaw-water trickled down to the surface of a frozen lake.
After rising two hundred feet, we stood beneath the beacons which loomed above to a height of one hundred and twenty-eight feet. The organ-pipes were basaltic** in character but, to my great joy, I found the beacons were of sedimentary rock. After a casual examination, the details were left till the morrow.