I should have found the scene magnificent, I
doubt not; for the sun, being low with westering, shone redly, and the
range of ice stood in a kind of gold atmosphere which gave an
extraordinary richness to the shadowings of its rocks and peaks, and a
particular fullness of mellow whiteness to its lustrous parts, softening
the dazzle into an airy tenderness of brightness, so that the whole mass
shone out with the blandness visible in a glorious star. But its main
beauty lay in those features by which I knew it to be ice--I mean in a
vast surprising variety of forms, such as steeples, towers, columns,
pyramids, ruins as it might be of temples, grotesque shapes as of mighty
statues, left unfinished by the hands of Titans, domes as of cathedrals,
castellated heights, fragments of ramparts, and the like. These features
lay in groups, as if veritably the line of coast were dotted with
gatherings of royal mansions and remains of imperial magnificence, all
of white marble, yet with a glassy tincture as though the material owned
something of a Parian quality.

I had to come within two miles, as I have said, before these elegancies
broke upon me, so deceptively did their delicacy of outlines mingle with
the dark blue softness beyond. In places the coast ran up to a height of
two or three hundred feet, in others it sloped down to twenty feet. For
some miles it was like the face of a cliff, a sheer abrupt, with scarce
a scar upon its front, staring with a wild bald look over the frosty
beautiful blue of that afternoon sea. Here and there it projected a
forefoot, some white and massive rock, upon which the swell of the ocean
burst in thunder, and flew to almost the height of the cliff in a very
great and glorious fury of foam. In other parts, where I suspected a
sort of beach, there was the silver tremble of surf; but in the main,
the heave coming out of the north-east, the folds swept the base of the
ice without froth.

I say again, beheld in the red sunshine, that line of ice, resembling a
coast of marble defining the liquid junction of the swelling folds of
sapphire below and the moist violet of the eastern sky beyond and over
it, crowned at points with delicate imitations of princely habitations,
would have offered a noble and magnificent spectacle to a mind at ease;
but to my eyes its enchantments were killed by the horror I felt. It was
a lonely, hideous waste, rendered the more shocking by the consideration
that the whole vast