We Had Come About Eighty Miles
Since Leaving Spitzbergen.
The usual boundary of the
Greenland ice in summer runs, according to Scoresby,
along the second parallel of west longitude.
This we had
already crossed, so that it was to be presumed the
barricade we saw before us was a frontier of the fixed
ice. In accordance, therefore, with my predetermined
plan, we now began working to the southward, and the
result fully justified my expectations.
The sea became comparatively clear, as far as could be
seen from the deck of the vessel, although small vagrant
patches of ice that we came up with occasionally - as well
as the temperature of the air and the sea - continued to
indicate the proximity of larger bodies on either side
of us.
It was a curious sensation with which we had gradually
learnt to contemplate this inseparable companion: it had
become a part of our daily existence, an element, a thing
without which the general aspect of the universe would
be irregular and incomplete. It was the first thing we
thought of in the morning, the last thing we spoke of at
night. It glittered and grinned maliciously at us in the
sunshine; it winked mysteriously through the stifling
fog; it stretched itself like a prostrate giant, with
huge, portentous shoulders and shadowy limbs, right across
our course; or danced gleefully in broken groups in the
little schooner's wake. There was no getting rid of it,
or forgetting it, and if at night we sometimes returned
in dreams to the green summer world - to the fervent
harvest fields of England, and heard "the murmurs of
innumerous bees," or the song of larks on thymy
uplands - thump!
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