“I smell ice!” he exclaimed.
I thought he might wish me to sniff too, which I did, somewhat ostentatiously, perhaps, that he might notice me; but as to smelling ice—why, ’twas all snow to me, with a coldness in it that went beyond ice, to my mind. The flakes were still rolling over us, dense as smoke, from the lead-coloured sky, and the ship’s bowsprit was nearly out of sight.
Once more the mate sniffed up the air with wide nostrils, went to the rail and thrust his head over, with a long, probing look ahead, and then came back to where I was standing. He was about to speak, when, out from the whirling, wool-white thickness forward, came the loud and fearful cry:
“Ice right ahead, sir!”
“Ice right ahead, sir!” re-echoed the mate in a shriek, whipping round his face towards the captain.
“I see it, sir! I see it!” cried the skipper. “Hard a starboard! hard a starboard! over with it for your lives, lads!”
The spokes revolved like the driving-wheel of a locomotive in the hands of the two seamen, and the ship paid off with a slow, stately sweep of her head, as she swung upon the underrun of a huge Pacific sea, brimming to her counter, and roaring in thunder along the line of her water-ways—and just in time!
For, out upon the starboard bow there leapt out of the snowstorm, in proportions as huge as those of the cathedral of St. Paul’s, a monster iceberg. It all happened in a minute, and what a minute was that! It was a prodigious crystalline mass, some of the sharp curves of it of a keen blue, the summits deep in snow, and the sides frightfully scored and gashed into ravines and gorges and caverns, whilst all about the sky-line of it, showing faintly in the whirling flakes, were forms of pinnacles and spires, of towers and minarets, columns like those of ruins, and wild and startling shapes like couchant beasts of colossal size, giant helmets, forts, turreted heads of castles, and I know not what besides.
In the fair and streaming sunshine, that would have filled it with flaming jewels of light, and kindled all kinds of rich and shining colours, it would have glowed out upon the sea as a most glorious, most magnificent object; but now, with the shadow upon it of the storm-laden sky, and rendered wild beyond imagination by the gyrations of the clouds of snow all about it, it offered a most dreadful and terrifying picture as it swept past, with the noise of the great seas bursting at its base, smiting the ear like shocks of earthquake.