'Where's a man's chance of getting ashore?'
The whaleman seemed to address another, probably the mate, who stood a little distance from him.
'There's some landing-places on the south side,' he presently called. 'There's shelter there from the westerly winds. But you must see to your ship, for the ice is plentiful and dangerous.'
'The wreck lies on the north side of the island,' I called to Cliffe.
'Is there no landing on the north of the island?' shouted the little fellow.
The other answered, but the words were lost in a sudden blast or squall of wind which blew betwixt our masts in a shriek like a locomotive's. A moment later I saw the skipper of the whaler, as I presumed the bear-coated man to be, motioning to his crew and heard him, but faintly, shouting; thereupon the ship's topsail-yard was swung: the man brandished his fist in a farewell to us, and whilst we still lay as though hove, with the weather leech-rope of our band of topsail shaking at every smoking plunge of the brig's head, the ship heeled over, and gathering way, broke the seas off her lee bow with glaring heaps, and melted into a swollen smudge in the heart of a body of vapour when our crew were trimming sail for the course to the New Orkneys.
The rolling ocean, sallow still, was thick in many places with fog. We saw now that ice lay all about us. There was scarce an opening in the vaporous folds that was not filled with a berg near or distant, a dull, pale, motionless mass; the vast island that had been off our starboard quarter when the wind broke up the thickness, we had now brought on to our port bow, and were slowly passing; its loom was more like a blue shadow of land in the dull yellow light of that Antarctic afternoon, summer as it was, than ice: yet it was a vast berg stretching west and east: its westermost point was nearest and hung like a mass of foreland, wild with the vapour that flew smoking off its face and points, and with the leap of the surf at its base in lofty columns of foam, whose heads the wind swept off in clouds.
I stood beside Cliffe under the shelter of a large square of canvas in the main rigging: oilskinned figures watched on the forecastle; we drove very slowly; the running rigging had been seen to and carefully coiled down ready for instant handling should a sudden cry from the forecastle compel a shift of helm. I saw many birds flying in the hollow seas, and turning to mark the bearings of a small berg which had come and gone and come again on the starboard bow, I observed slowly swinging past about a half-acre of the giant kelp of this part of the world, a huge seaweed, glancing black in the whiteness of the froth, and hissing like shingle as the salt shot through it.
'Now that we are under way again,' I exclaimed, 'I am realising that the end of this cruise is at hand.'