It made me sullen to hear her, she reasoned so well, beyond any trick that I had for cheering her.
'We must wait and hope,' said I; 'we are not in the ice yet; there may come a ship.'
And setting my teeth I swung the glass out of its brackets fiery with some passing mood of wrath born of hopelessness and helplessness; for no sailor will stand at gaze and be deserted by his spirit as a man whilst there is a chance for life, though it be dim as a corposant in a burst of wet squall; but put him in my place—as I then was; aboard a dismasted hull rolling to her waterways in a steady pouring sea, a doom of ice filling the horizon to leeward: how should a sailor act as a man then save by a stony endurance that sounds gallantly if you call it heroic fortitude?
But the girl had boiled some cocoa: it waited: so I begged leave to hand her below out of the ceaseless howl of the ice-charged wind. Yet neither of us stayed long. She could not eat, and for my part 'twas as much as I could do to gulp down the steaming cocoa, good as it was.
I believe the sun set soon after two; the sky was everywhere of a wild crimson, flashing gorgeously where the luminary was; the sea came running in hard green lines, tall with passing heads, out of the splendour; then the ice was a wonderful scene indeed, delicately tinctured as it was with the redness. The shadow of the land hung afar in a dim, pink cloud, but though the barrier had been plain in view for some while I could not swear that within the last hour we had sensibly closed it. This gave me a little hope—though I didn't know any: I bade Miss Otway note it and she agreed with me—she had a sailor's eye for atmospheric distance—that the ice looked no nearer than it had within the past hour.
'Can we be in the grip of a westerly current?' thought I. Then, before the blaze faded in the west, I hauled down the flag and hoisted the burning lantern, for the delicate figures of the ice in the remote recesses where the film of it died out were so cheating in their likeness to ships lifting canvas and heading for us, that I could not persuade myself but one must prove a vessel—if not now, then presently.
I obliged Miss Otway to go below when the night fell. It was too cold for her. She was like to freeze to death. The ice loomed as a range of snow-covered cliff to leeward: it showed of a savage and deadly paleness under the stars which sheeted down weakly to it, though here and there one brighter than the rest glowed like a lighthouse lantern on some faint point. It was a wonderfully brilliant night, however, no moon that I remember, but overhead the larger stars had the rich tremble you see in the tropics; I had never seen such a field of brilliants—the stardust hovered like mist, and the height of the sky that night was awful to my solitary gaze.
At about eight o'clock we were, as I reckoned, about five miles distant from the nearest elbow of the ice. But though a tall sea still ran, giving the hull the lofty motions of a stately dancer, the wind was sensibly taking off. A frightful time was this! for if the hull struck on the hurl of such a surge as still roared under us, she would go to pieces in the twinkling of an eye. I was constantly looking over the side, reckoning to find us setting on to some detached mass of drift stuff, flat, but not the less deadly for being awash, but saw none. Suddenly I perceived a light upon the horizon right over the bows. I fancied my vision deceived me, that the trend of the ice was not as I imagined it to be in that darkness, that the light was some burning mountain far past the barrier, and that a shift of wind or change of stream or tide had altered the bearings: this I conceived and rushed headlong for a bull's-eye, which I flashed upon the compass; but no! the indications were as before.
What, then, was that light ahead? Miss Otway had followed me when I fled up the companion steps with a lighted bull's-eye.
'What is it?' she cried.