e on which she
rested; and this convinced me that the mass in whose hollow she had been
fixed had broken away and was afloat and riding upon the swell that
under-ran the billows. But I was far too much alarmed to feel any of
those transports in which I must have indulged had this issue to my
scheme happened in daylight and in smooth water. I was terrified by the
apprehensions which had occurred to me even whilst I was at work on the
mines; I mean, that if the bed broke away the schooner would make it
top-heavy and that it would capsize; and thus I stood in a very agony of
expectancy, caged like a rat, and as helpless as the dead.

Half an hour must have passed, during which time the decks were
incessantly swept by the seas, insomuch that I never once durst open the
door even to look out. But nothing having happened to increase my
consternation in this half-hour, though the movement in the schooner was
that of a very ponderous and majestical rolling and heaving, showing her
bed to be afloat, I began to find my spirits and to listen and wait with
some buddings of hope and confidence. At the expiration of this time the
seas began to fall less heavily and regularly on to the deck, and
presently I could only hear them breaking forward, but without a quarter
their former weight, and nothing worse came aft than large brisk showers
of spray.

I armed myself with additional clothing for the encounter of the wet,
cold, and wind, and then pushed open the door and stepped forth. The sky
was dark with rolling clouds, but the ice put its own light into the
air, and I could see as plain as if the first of the dawn had broken. It
was as I had supposed: the mass of the valley in which the schooner had
been sepulchred for eight-and-forty years had come away from the main,
and lay floating within a cable's length of the coast. A stranger,
wonderfuller picture human eye never beheld. The island shore ran a
rampart of faintness along the darkness to where it died out in liquid
dusk to right and left. The schooner sat upon a bed of ice that showed a
surface of about half an acre; her stern was close to the sea, and about
six feet above it. On her larboard quarter the slope or shoulder of the
acclivity had been broken by the rupture, and you looked over the side
into the clear sea beyond the limit of the ice there; but abreast of the
foreshrouds the ice rose in a kind of wall, a great splinter it looked
of what was before a small broad-browe