the raw
bear.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO.

A BRIEF BUT SINGULAR VOYAGE WINDS UP WITH A GREAT SURPRISE.

The calm which had fortunately prevailed since Angut and his friends
found refuge on the iceberg was not destined to continue.

A smart breeze at last sprang up from the northward, which soon
freshened into a gale, accompanied with heavy showers of snow, driving
the party into the cave, where the cold was so severe that they were
forced to take refuge in its deepest recesses, and to sit wrapped in
their bearskins, and huddled together for warmth, as monkeys are
sometimes seen on a cold day in a menagerie.

Being from the north, the wind not only intensified the cold, and
brought back for a time all the worst conditions of winter, but assisted
the great ocean current to carry the berg southward at a high rate of
speed. Their progress, however, was not very apparent to the eyes of
our voyagers, because all the surrounding bergs travelled in the same
direction and at nearly the same speed. The blinding snow effectually
hid the land from their view, and the only point of which they were
quite sure was that their berg must be the nearest to the Greenland
coast because all the others lay on their right hand.

Towards noon of the following day it was observed that the pack-ice
thickened around them, and was seen in large fields here and there,
through some of which the great berg ploughed its way with resistless
momentum. Before the afternoon the pack had closed entirely around
them, as if it had been one mass of solid, rugged ice--not a drop of
water being visible. Even through this mass the berg ploughed its way
slowly, but with great noise.

"There is something very awful to me in the sight of such tremendous
force," said Red Rooney to Angut, as they stood contemplating the havoc
their strange ship was making.

"Does it not make you think," returned the Eskimo, "how powerful must be
the Great Spirit who made all things, when a little part of His work is
so tremendous?"

Rooney did not reply, for at that moment the berg grounded, with a shock
that sent all its spires and pinnacles tumbling. Fortunately, the
Eskimos were near their cavern, into which they rushed, and escaped the
terrible shower. But the cave could no longer be regarded as a place of
safety. It did indeed shelter them from the immediate shower of masses,
even the smaller of which were heavy enough to have killed a walrus; but
at that advance