I reckoned our speed at
about four miles an hour, as fast as a hearty man could walk. The high
stern, narrow as it was, helped us; it was like a mizzen in its way; and
all aloft being stout to start with and greatly thickened yet by ice,
the surface up there gave plenty for the gale to catch hold on; and so
we drove along.

I could just make out the dim pallid loom of the coast of ice upon the
starboard beam, and a blob or two of faintness--most elusive and not to
be fixed by the eye staring straight at them--on the larboard bow. But
it was not long before these blobs, as I term them, grew plainer, and
half a score swam into the dusk over the bowsprit end, and resembled
dull small visionary openings in the dark sky there, or like stars
magnified and dimmed into the merest spectral light by mist. I passed
the first at a distance of a quarter of a mile; it slided by
phantasmally, and another stole out right ahead. This I could have gone
widely clear of by a little shift of the helm, but whilst I was in the
act of starboarding three or four bergs suddenly showed on the larboard
bow, and I saw that unless I had a mind to bring the ship into the
trough again I must keep straight on. So I steered to bring the berg
that was right ahead a little on the bow, with a prayer in my soul that
there might be no low-lying block in the road for the schooner to split
upon. It went by within a pistol-shot. I was very much accustomed to the
sight of ice by this time, yet I found myself glancing at this mass with
pretty near as much wonder and awe as if I had never seen such a thing
before. It was not above thirty feet high, but its shape was exactly
that of a horse's head, the lips sipping the sea, the ears cocked, the
neck arching to the water. You would have said it was some vast courser
rising out of the deep. The peculiar radiance of ice trembled off it
like a luminous mist into the dusk. The water boiled about its nose, and
suggested a frothing caused by the monster steed's expelled breath. Let
a fire have been kindled to glow red where you looked for the eye, and
the illusion would have been frightfully grand.

The poet speaks of the spirits of the vasty deep; if you want to know
what exquisite artists they are, enter the frozen silences of the south.

Thus threading my way I drove before the seas and wind, striking a piece
of ice but once only, and that a small lump which hit the vessel on the
bow and went scraping past, doing th