e ice-fields and the
icebergs inspired Madame d'Aunet with profound emotion, and, in
describing them, she breaks out into what may be called a lyrical cry.
"These Polar ices," she exclaims, "which no dust has ever stained, as
spotless now as on the first day of the creation, are tinted with the
vividest colours, so that they look like rocks composed of precious
stones: the glitter of the diamond, the dazzling hues of the sapphire
and the emerald, blend in an unknown and marvellous substance. Yonder
floating islands, incessantly undermined by the sea, change their
outline every moment; by an abrupt movement the base becomes the summit;
a spire transforms itself into a mushroom; a column broadens out into a
vast flat table, a tower is changed into a flight of steps; and all so
rapidly and unexpectedly that, in spite of oneself, one dreams that some
supernatural will presides over those sudden transformations. At the
first glance I could not help thinking that I saw before me a city of
the fays, destroyed at one fell blow by a superior power, and condemned
to disappear without leaving a trace of its existence. Around me hustled
fragments of the architecture of all periods and every style:
campaniles, columns, minarets, ogives, pyramids, turrets, cupolas,
crenelations, volutes, arcades, facades, colossal foundations,
sculptures as delicate as those which festoon the shapely pillars of our
cathedrals--all were massed together and confused in a common disaster.
An _ensemble_ so strange, so marvellous, the artist's brush is unable to
reproduce, and the writer's words fail adequately to describe!

"This region, where everything is cold and inert, has been represented,
has it not? as enveloped in a deep and sublime silence. But the reader
must please to receive a very different impression; nothing can give any
fit idea of the tremendous tumult of a day of thaw at Spitzbergen.

"The sea, bristling with jagged sheets of ice, clangs and clatters
noisily; the lofty littoral peaks glide down to the shore, fall away,
and plunge into the gulf of waters with an awful crash. The mountains
are rent and splintered; the waves dash furiously against the granite
capes; the icebergs, as they shiver into pieces, give vent to sharp
reports like the rattle of musketry; the wind with a hoarse roar,
scatters tornadoes of snow abroad.... It is terrible, it is magnificent;
one seems to hear the chorus of the abysses of the old world preluding a
new