'No,' said I, shortly.
She viewed me a little gratefully. I grasped the brake: she put her hand upon it, and we fell to afresh.
We worked in this fashion for above half an hour, and then Miss Otway, glowing with the labour and in no wise distressed by it, saving that her breathing was quick, went below. I fetched the telescope and stayed to carefully search the horizon before it fell dark. But point the tubes as I would they gave me nothing. The near sea-line tumbled dimly in long ragged wings of dark vapour, which as they lifted with the wind stretched overhead like lengths of smoke; and betwixt them I spied a higher platform of cloud, mouse-coloured here and there as though touched by some wild stormy light. I saw no ice, but the wind blew as though ice were close aboard: the sting of it was insufferable when you faced it standing. A noise of rattling sometimes came from the forecastle as though the spray froze in leaping, and fell with the weight of hail in the tropics, and already the pump we had been plying was as thick and hard bound as the other.
And still I lingered, not indeed with the hope of sighting a sail before the blackness fell upon us, but with the idea of making some sort of blind guess at the drift of the hull. The strong breeze blew out of the north, and the tall coils of sea ran in wide flashings from that quarter, but the large ocean swell was about north-west. I was not very well acquainted with these waters and scarcely knew what to recollect of the currents hereabouts. I was aware that the set of the ice was to the northwards. But then the bergs struck deep root into motions of the sea which had no influence atop; so that there might be very well a surface-trend to the southward through wind and surge and swell, when, some fathoms under, the body of the water was slowly streaming in another direction.
A dismal picture with the sadness of despair coming into me out of it, when I looked at that square of bunting flaming in mute appeal from the stump-head to the blind horizon! But we had life, and so there must be hope, and rallying my spirits with a will, I strode the length of the life-line to the halliards, hauled the flag down, and went to the cabin to find and trim a lantern to hoist in its place.
CHAPTER XV THE ICE IN THE SOUTH
I left a light burning brightly at the mast-head: the wild meteoric dance of that gleam was a sort of hope: no ship sighting it but would guess from the rapidity of its oscillations that it danced on an open boat, or shone from some short height upon a dismasted hull.
The wind was freshening with a long deep moan in the rush of it through the flying dusk when I left the deck: but I gathered from a general atmospheric hardening all round, a firmer line in the curl of the surge, a distincter flash in the foam of it, that it was to be a clear night, with perhaps a star or two by-and-by. The hull made good play: she was like a live thing; and no helm and no fragment of canvas vexing her, she took up her own position and wallowed dryly, save that now and again in a sharp pitch she'd meet some lateral run of sea and whiten in the air forward into the look of a snow-storm: but the froth mostly blew clear, and the water when it came streaming aft quickly froze into the snow.