CHAPTER XXVII CORONATION ISLAND
But it was not till next day that we had the land in view, and then it was ten o'clock on February morning, making it a few days above a month since we had sailed out of Table Bay. As on the previous day, so on this, the sun shone brightly, with even some comfort of warmth in its light. Many great clouds of a milk-white softness were sailing into the east; the wind was fresh out of the west, but though the sea ran briskly, with a shrewd vapour of salt in the shrill fling of the frothing curls, it was not a hollow sea; it rolled the brig in stately measures, but she was now under small sail, the ice being very plentiful and the sea crowded with bergs of all sizes, whilst right ahead were tall cliffs of ice backed by a blue shadow of mountain rising into a silver faintness where the eternal snows upon it sparkled and died out from the sight in the deep blue.
I was beside myself with excitement and wretched with distress of expectation, dread, and hope. That height of white cliff right ahead, broken in the foreground by pale floating islands, its face discoloured in places as though the ice that masked the rock had broken from the black and savage rampart, was Coronation Island, and on the port bow, looming distant but immense, were the mountains of Laurie Island.
Our anchors were at the cathead, ready for letting go in case of sudden need; the men hung about on the look-out for ice, ready in an instant to trim sail. We were sailing towards the island through an avenue of bergs: clear water sparkled from the thrust of our stem to the very wash of the distant surf, with no other obstructions than here and there a lump of the crystal stuff lifting sullenly with the swell, flashing gloriously, and so proclaiming itself to the sight when the sunbeam smote the foam that poured off it.
A chart of the islands lay upon the skylight, and every few minutes I would be dropping the telescope to look at the chart, to gather from the tracing the point of coast we were heading for. The whaleman had said that the wreck lay on a ledge in Palmer's Bay, and Cliffe and I were agreed that that large indent was between the two towering shadows, to the right of the taller peak that soared a thousand feet higher than Table Mountain.
The icebergs obstructed the view. The line of coast was studded with them: yet every moment I was sinking my sight through the lenses into each opening betwixt the bergs. The brig's progress under her small canvas was about four knots and a half; I'd glanced for a moment at some stately frozen pile majestically rocking and slowly veering by, then put my eye to the glass afresh. My very soul was now loathing the sight of the ice. The largest of the islands was no longer an object of splendour and sublimity, but of horror and heart-weariness, charged with a spirit of desolation that subdued me to a sort of numbness of mind if I looked long: it seemed to stonefy the very principle of life in me, as though there was a horrid magic in its bald white stare to look a man into craziness, and emptiness, and into its own frozen lifelessness.
But now, as we approached, the features of the land began to steal out into a brilliant keenness wherever there was space for them to show betwixt the floating ice, and on a sudden, whilst I was looking through the glass, the motion of the brig slided a seaborne hill away to the left, and exposed a front of cliff that lay with a shadow upon it as though it was a sort of ravine, at the foot of which, though I instantly guessed it would lift to some height above the sea as we got nearer, lay a black speck. I looked again, and cried out wild with excitement:
'Cliffe, I have the hull! I have the hull!'
The little man came headlong to my side, and put his grimacing face to the telescope.