ast ran away on either hand in cold motionless
blocks of pallor, which further on fell (by deception of the sheen of
the stars) into a kind of twisting and snaking glimmer, and you followed
it into an extraordinarily elusive faintness that was neither light nor
colour in the liquid gloom, long after the sight had outrun the
visibility of the range. At intervals I was startled by sounds,
sometimes sullen, like a muffled subterranean explosion, sometimes
sharp, like a quick splintering of an iron-hard substance. These noises,
I presently gathered, were made by the ice stretching and cracking in
fifty different directions. The mass was so vast and substantial you
could not but think of it as a country with its foot resting upon the
bed of the sea. 'Twas a folly of my nerves no doubt, yet it added to my
consternation to reflect that this solid territory, reverberating the
repelled blows of the ocean swell, was as much afloat as my boat, and so
much less actual than my boat that, could it be towed a few degrees
further north, it would melt into pouring waters and vanish as utterly
with its little cities of columns, steeples, and minarets as a wreath of
steam upon the air.

This gave a spirit-like character to it in my dismayed inquiring eyes
which was greatly increased by the vagueness it took from the dusk. It
was such a scene, methought, as the souls of seamen drowned in these
seas might flock to and haunt. The white and icy spell upon it wrought
in familiar things. The stars looking down upon me over the edge of the
cliffs were like the eyes of shapes (easy to fashion out of the
darkness) kneeling up there and peering at the human intruder who was
pacing his narrow floor of ice for warmth. The deceit of the shadows
proportioned the blanched ruggedness of the cliff's face on the north
side into heads and bodies of monsters. I beheld a giant, from his waist
up, leaning his cheek upon his arm; a great cross with a burlesque
figure, as of a friar, kneeling near it; a mighty helmet with a white
plume curled; the shadowy conformation of a huge couchant beast, with a
hundred other such unsubstantial prodigies. Had the moon shone in the
west I dare say I should have witnessed a score more such things, for
the snow was like white paper, on which the clear black shadows of the
ice-rocks could not but have cast the likeness of many startling
phantasies.

I sought to calm my mind by considering my position, and to divert my
thought