flection that waved in the sea under her like
several lengths of undulating red-hot wire. My haven was still very
tranquil--the boat lay calm; but there was a deeper tone in the booming
sound of the distant surf, and a more menacing note in the echoing of
the blows of the swell along this side of the coast, whence I concluded
that, despite the fairness of the weather, the heave of the deep had,
whilst I slept, gathered a greater weight, which might signify stormy
winds not very many leagues away.

The pale stare of the heights of ice at that red and shapeless disc was
shocking. "Oh," I cried aloud, as I had once cried before, "but for one,
even but for one, companion to speak to!"

I had no mind to lie down again. The cold indeed was cruelly sharp, and
the smoke sped from my mouth with every breath as though I held a
tobacco pipe betwixt my teeth. I got upon the ice and stepped about it
quickly, darting searching glances into the gloom to left and right of
the setting moon; but all lay bare, bleak, and black. I pulled off my
stout gloves with the hope of getting my fingers to tingle by handling
the snow; but it was frozen so hard I could not scrape up with my nails
as much as a half-dozen of flakes would make. What I got I dissolved in
my mouth and found it brackish; however, I suspected it would be sweeter
and perhaps not so stonily frozen higher up, where there was less chance
of the salt spray mingling with it, and I resolved when the light came
to fill my empty beer-bottles as with salt or pounded sugar for use
hereafter--that is, if it should prove sweet; as to melting it, I had
indeed a tinder-box and the means of obtaining fire, but no fuel.

It seemed as if the night had only just descended, so tardy was the
dawn. Outside the slanting wall of ice that made my haven the swell
swept past in a gurgling, bubbling, drowning sound, dismal and ghastly,
as though in truth some such ogre as the monster I had dreamt of lay
suffocating there. I welcomed the cold colouring of the east as if it
had been a ship, and watched the stars dying and the frozen shore
darkening to the dim and sifting dawn behind it, against which the
outline of the cliffs ran in a broken streak of ink. The rising of the
sun gave me fresh life. The ice flashed out of its slatish hue into a
radiant white, the ocean changed into a rich blue that seemed as violet
under the paler azure of the heavens; but I could now see that the
swell was heavier than