What was to be done? I had been cast in my time in many situations of peril, yet had never known myself despairful even in the blackest hour of my troubles: but I own my heart fell now, my spirits sank, hope died when I looked at those leagues of horizon of ice and reflected upon my helplessness. Could I have summoned the help of but another pair of hands I might have made some desperate effort with capstan and leading-blocks to cap the stump of the foremast with another height of spar, and get a jib stretched that her head might pay off and bring her under some sort of control to enable me to thread the waterways betwixt the bergs. But, single-handed, I could do nothing. There was no height of foremast for the setting of any sort of rag that would round her head away and keep her before it—I mean, in a fashion to hold her responsive to the helm.
When I made the discovery that the hull was setting dead on to the ice, Miss Otway was in the cabin boiling some cocoa for a scrambling afternoon meal; she came up while I stood swaying on the heave of the plank, my arms tightly folded, my eyes rooted to the ice; instantly it was as clear to her as to me whither our drift was tending, and she uttered a low cry as though she had been struck.
The mere sight of her, however, did me good—it quickened perception of my obligations as a man. Her face was white as the foam over the side; her pale lips moved, but the shrill wind sheared with icy-edge through her words as they came to her lips. She sent a blind, staggering glance round the western and northern sea line, and, knitting her face into a look of resolution, she said:
'It is God's will. But, Mr. Selby, it is a dreadful death to die.'
'I am pleased when you look so,' said I, 'but not when you speak so. It is God's will, as you say. But what is that will? What's to be our fate? Look how those blue shadows in the ice open and widen. The bergs appear close together; hundreds of fathoms separate them in reality, and if we are to drift into the huddle why shouldn't we scrape through?'
'To where?'
'To where?... There may be open water beyond, and a ship.'
'No, no, land!' she cried, 'land! See the shadow of it. It was visible in the telescope only a little while ago: now I see it like a forming cloud. It will be all ice to the rocks, and some break will let us in and we shall drift deep and be locked up and left—and left——'
And now she could scarcely articulate for some spasm in her throat, and her poor white face was all awork with the horrors of her imagination.