and in
a very few minutes afterwards the _Flying Fish_ was once more afloat,
with her water-chambers full and her air-compressor working to the full
extent of its power.

The hawser being this time temporarily secured in such a manner as to
render a repetition of their late accident impossible, and the entire
party being, moreover, safely ensconced in the pilot-house, there was no
hesitation about again pressing the ship forward at full speed, the
channel, luckily, being straight enough to allow of this; and very soon
the group of icebergs in which the unfortunate barque was entangled once
more appeared in view. Mildmay was at the helm, with the professor
standing by the engines; but Sir Reginald and the colonel no sooner saw
the bergs than they seized their telescopes and began at once to look
out for the barque.

At first they could see nothing of her, but presently she glided into
view from behind an intervening berg, and a single glance was sufficient
to assure them that another five minutes would decide her fate. She had
gradually set down into the triangular extremity of the bight in which
she was embayed, so that every tack she made became shorter than the one
preceding it, and very soon the water space would become so
circumscribed as to leave no room for her to manoeuvre. But this was
not the worst feature of the case. As desperate diseases are sometimes
combated with desperate remedies, so in her desperate condition the
hazardous and almost hopeless expedient of berthing her alongside one of
the edges of the floe might have been attempted. But this last resource
was denied to the despairing seamen, from the fact that two enormous
bergs, the vanguard of the fleet, had already reached the edge of the
floe, on opposite sides of the bay, to windward of the entrapped barque,
and were rapidly rasping their way down toward the apex of the triangle
where the whaler was already shooting into stays for what must evidently
be her last tack. This would be so short that she could scarcely fail
to miss stays on her next attempt, when she would drift helplessly down
into the corner of the bight, and be ground out of existence by the berg
which first happened to reach that point.

It was at this critical moment that a cry of dismay arose simultaneously
from the lips of the party in the _Flying Fish's_ pilot-house. A slight
turn in the channel had revealed to them the appalling fact that it,
also, terminated in a _cu