Five Nights: A Novel

by Victoria Cross

I got away from them all and went back to my place as soon as I could, and spent the rest of the morning as I had begun it, alone at the forward end.

There were very few passengers like myself. Not many people for mere pleasure would take that hazardous voyage along the coast, for it was new country and not a tenth of the sunken rocks and dangerous shoals were yet on any chart. All the way up along that rocky and treacherous shore we had seen the evidences of wreck and disaster everywhere. Above the flats of shimmering water, where the gold or crimson of sunset lay, rose constantly the tops of masts, shadowy and spectral, telling of the sunken hull, the pale corpses beneath those gleaming waves. Ship after ship went down out of those adventurous little coasting vessels that plied up and down the coast trading with the natives, and as we passed these half submerged masts, we often asked ourselves—"Will the Cottage City be more lucky?" She was trading, like all the other boats that go there, with the Alaskan natives, and to go as far north as the Muir was no part of the official programme.

But the fares of the few passengers who really wished to take all risks and go there was a temptation and overcame the fear of the dreaded Taku Inlet with its monstrous crashing bergs and its possibility of sudden and furious storms. So the little steamer was here, creeping up slowly through this vision of mystic blue towards the glacier, which lay there white, vast, shadowy, mysterious, and my heart beat quicker and quicker as we approached.

I went off in one of the first boats and the moment it touched the pebbly strand of the side of the inlet I jumped out and walked away, eager to be alone to enjoy the glory of it all away from the rasping voices, the worldly talk of my companions, the perpetual "littleness" of ideas that humanity drags with it everywhere.

As I turned from the boat the voices followed me clearly, distinctly, in the exquisite rarefied air.

Thin waves of laughter mingled with them from time to time, growing faint behind me, then the distance closed up between us and I heard no more.

The steamer had landed about thirty passengers and crew, and they seemed immediately lost in these vast expanses. When I had walked a few minutes up the beach from the water's edge, I looked round and was apparently alone. Some few black dots here and there disfiguring the snowy slopes and glittering ice-covered rocks was all that remained of them. In the midst of the vivid blue-green of the inlet behind me, a little wedge of black, lay the steamer, the only reminder that I was one also of these miserable black dots and in an hour I should be collected and taken away as one of them. For this hour, however, I was free and at one with the divine glory about me.

It was just noon. The sky was of a pale and perfect blue, the air still, of miraculous clearness and radiant with the pure light of the North, unshaded, unsoftened by the smallest mist or cloud. The silence was unbroken except for the regular thunder of the falling bergs, that continued with absolute precision at the five-minute interval, and the accompanying splash of the water. I walked on up the strand, having the great glistening wall of the glacier's face somewhat on my left. It was impossible to approach it on land, as the fervid green water lay deep all about its base. It was only at the side of the inlet that little beaches had been formed, and on one of these I stood. The steamer could not get nearer the glacier for fear of the floating bergs, and a small boat could only approach with deadliest peril at the risk of being crushed beneath the falling ice or swamped by the wild division and upheaval of the water that it caused.

But here, on the beach, was a world of enchantment second only in beauty to the glacier itself, for many of the bergs had been stranded there by the playful tides. They stood there now towering up in a thousand different forms, hundreds of feet above one's head, drawing all the light of the sunbeams into their glittering recesses, turning them there into violet, purple, and crimson hues, mauve, saffron, and emerald, blood-red and topaz, and then throwing them out in a million lance-like rays of colour, dazzling and blinding the vision. Like the most wonderful rainbows turned into solid masses they stood there, or like the jewels, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds broken from some giant's crown and scattered recklessly along the strand.

I went up to them and walked beneath an ice arch that glowed rose without as the sun touched it and deepest violet within. Then on, into a cave beyond where the last chamber was coldest white but the outer rim seemed hung with blood-red fire and the middle wall glowed deepest emerald. On, on from one to another, each like a perfect dream of exquisite colour: sunrise and sunset, and all the hues of earth that we ever see were blended together in those glorious bergs.