d myself to the ascent
of the starboard slope, and scaled it much more easily than I had
yesterday managed to make my way over the rocks. I climbed to the
highest block that was nearest me on the summit, and here I had a very
large view of the scene. Much to my astonishment, the first objects
which encountered my eye were four icebergs, floating detached but close
together at a distance of about three miles on my side of the north-east
trend of the island. I counted them and made them four. They swam low,
and it was very easily seen they had formed part of the coast there,
though, as the form of the ice that way was not familiar to me, and as,
moreover, the glare rendered the prospect very deceptive, I could not
distinguish where the ruptures were. But one change in the face of this
white country I did note, and that was the entire disappearance of two
of the most beautiful of the little crystal cities that adorned the
northward range. The gale of the night had wrought havoc, and the
unsubstantiality of this dazzling kingdom of ice was made startlingly
apparent by the evanishment of the delicate glassy architecture, and by
those four white hills floating like ships under their courses and
topsails out upon the flashing hurry and leaping blue and yeast of the
water.

It was blowing harder than I had imagined. The wind was extraordinarily
sharp, and the full current of it not long to be endured on my
unsheltered eminence. The sea, swelling up from the south, ran high, and
was full of seething and tumbling noises, and of the roaring of the
breakers, dashing themselves against the ice in prodigious bodies of
foam, which so boiled along the foot of the cliffs that their fronts,
rising out of it, might have passed for the spume itself freezing as it
leapt into a solid mass of glorious brilliance. The eye never explored a
scene more full of the splendour of light and of vivid colour. Here and
there the rocks shone prismatically as though some flying rainbow had
shivered itself upon them and lay broken. The blue of the sea and sky
was deepened into an exquisite perfection of liquid tint by the blinding
whiteness of the ice, which in exchange was sharpened into a wonderful
effulgence by the hues above and around it. Again and again, along the
whole range, far as the sight could explore, the spray rose in stately
clouds of silver, which were scattered by the wind in meteoric
scintillations of surpassing beauty, flashing through t