I looked aloft and about me, wondering that the body of the vessel and her masts and rigging should not be sheathed with ice; but if ever the structure had been glazed in her time, when she lay hard and fast far to the north of Spitzbergen, for all one could tell, nothing was now frozen; there was not so much as an icicle anywhere visible about her. The decks were dry, and on my kicking a coil of rope that was near my feet the stuff did not crackle, as one could have expected, as though frosted to the core.
"The vessel seems to have been thawed through," said I, "and I expect that this berg is only a fragment of the mass that broke adrift with her."
"Likely enough," said Sweers. "Hark! what is that?"
"What do you hear?" I exclaimed.
"Why, that!" cried he, pointing to a shallow fissure in the icy rocks which towered above the ship: and down the fissure I spied a cascade of water falling like smoke, with a harsh, hissing noise, which I had mistaken for the seething of the sea. I ran my eye over the face of the heights and witnessed many similar falls of water.
"There'll not be much of this iceberg left soon," said I, "if the drift is to the southward."
"What d'ye think,—that the drift's northerly?" exclaimed Sweers. "I'll tell you what it is; it's these icebergs drifting in masses down south into the Atlantic which cause the sudden spells of cold weather you get in England during seasons when it ought to be hot."
As he said this he walked to the companion-hatch, the cover of which was closed, and the door shut. The cover yielded to a thrust of his hand. He then pulled open the doors and put his head in, and I heard him spit.
"There's foul air here," said he; "but where a match will burn a man can breathe, I've learnt."
He struck a match, and descended two or three steps of the ladder, and then called out to me to follow. The air was not foul, but it was close, and there was a dampish smell upon it, and it was charged with a fishy odour like that of decaying spawn and dead marine vegetation. Light fell through the companion-way, and a sort of blurred dimness drained through the grimy skylight.