a ravine not discernible from
where the boat lay. When I was within twenty feet of the summit of the
cliff, the acclivity continuing gentle to the very brow, but much
broken, as I have said, I noticed this hollow, and more particularly a
small collection of ice-forms, not nearly so large as the other groups
of this kind, but most dainty and lovely nevertheless. They showed as
the heads of trees might to my ascent, and when I had got a little
higher I observed that they were formed upon the hither side of the
hollow, as though the convulsion which had wrought that chasm had tossed
up those exquisite caprices of ice. However, I was too eager to view the
prospect from the top of the cliff to suffer my admiration to detain me;
in a few minutes I had gained the brow, and, clambering on to a mass of
rock, I sent my gaze around.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE FROZEN SCHOONER.

I found myself on the summit of a kind of table-land; vast bodies of
ice, every block weighing hundreds and perhaps thousands of tons lay
scattered over it; yet for the space of a mile or so the character was
that of flatness. Southwards the range went upwards to a coastal front
of some hundred feet, with a huddle of peaks and strange configurations
behind soaring to an elevation from the sea-line of two or three hundred
feet. Northwards the range sloped gradually, with such a shelving of its
hinder part that I could catch a glimpse of a little space of the blue
sea that way. From this I perceived that whatever thickness and surface
of ice lay southwards, in the north it was attenuated to the shape of a
wedge, so that its extreme breadth where it projected its cape or
extremity would not exceed a musket shot.

A companion might have qualified in my mind something of the sense of
prodigious loneliness and desolation inspired by that huge picture of
dazzling uneven whiteness, blotting out the whole of the south-east
ocean, rolling in hills of blinding brilliance into the blue heavens,
and curving and dying out into an airy film of silvery-azure radiance
leagues away down in the south-west. But to my solitary eye the
spectacle was an amazing and confounding one.

If I had not seen the tract of dark blue water in the north-east, I
might have imagined that this island stretched as far into the east and
north as it did in the south and west. And one thing I quickly enough
understood: that if I wanted to behold the ocean on the east side of the
ice I should