nd weighty
swell that was rolling up from the north-east. I tried to stand, but was
so benumbed that many minutes passed before I had the use of my legs.
Brightly as the sun shone there was no more warmth in his light than you
find in a moon-beam on a frosty night, and the bite in the air was like
the pang of ice itself pressed against the cheek. My right hand suffered
most; I had fallen asleep clasping the loom of the steering oar, and
when I awoke my fingers still gripped it, so that, on withdrawing them,
they remained curved like talons, and I believed I had lost their use,
and even reckoned they would snap off and so set up a mortification,
till by much diligent rubbing I grew sensible of a small glow which,
increasing, ended in rendering the joints supple.

I stood up to take a view of the horizon, and the first sight that met
my eye forced a cry from me. Extending the whole length of the
south-west seaboard lay what I took to be a line of white coast melting
at either extremity into the blue airy distance. Even at the low
elevation of the boat my eye seemed to measure thirty miles of it. It
was not white as chalk is; there was something of a crystalline
complexion upon the face of its solidity. It was too far off to enable
me to remark its outline; yet on straining my sight--the atmosphere
being very exquisitely clear--I thought I could distinguish the
projections of peaks, of rounded slopes, and aerial angularities in
places which, in the refractive lens of the air, looked, with their hue
of glassy azure, like the loom of high land behind the coastal line.

The notion that it was ice came into my head after the first prospect of
it; and then I returned to my earlier belief that it was land. Methought
if it were ice, it must be the borderland of the Antarctic circle, the
limits of the unfrozen ocean, for it was incredible that so mighty a
body could signify less than the capes and terraces of a continent of
ice glazing the circumference of the pole for leagues and leagues; but
then I also knew that, though first the brig and then my boat had been
for days steadily blown south, I was still to the north of the South
Shetland parallels, and many degrees therefore removed from the polar
barrier. Hence I concluded that what I saw was land, and that the
peculiar crystal shining of it was caused by the snow that covered it.

But what land? Some large island that had been missed by the explorers
and left uncharted? I pu