238 BACK'S VOYAGE IN THE TERROR. 



scene of awful dangers without a catastrophe, and of 

 providential deliverances, without any instrumentality 

 of man. The scenery was sometimes magnificently sol- 

 emn, with such a perspective of moving, frowning, stu 

 pendous towers and bulwarks, as few human beings 

 have ever witnessed ; and often, on the contrary, was it 

 so enwrapped in fog, that its dreadful perils were much 

 more readily heard than seen. 



On several occasions the ship was violently nipped, 

 and lifted herself up vertically to more than twice the 

 former height, and groaned from the severity of the un- 

 der-pressure. Once the ice-masses near her came im- 

 petuously on, and tossed their enormous weight against 

 her, and threw her up and considerably over to star- 

 board. At another time the lateral pressure crushed 

 the contiguous ice into debris, and threw up a huge 

 mass fully nineteen feet above the general level, and 

 rolled the adjacent floe into hummocks, mounds, peaks, 

 splinters, walls, and ramparts. At another time, after 

 Borne alternations of commotion and quiet, and when all 

 bad symptoms of an uproar had disappeared, the vast 

 contiguous masses suddenly started into tumult, rubbed 

 and tossed one another in furious conflict, flung piece 

 over piece till all was a chaos, made the ship rise up 

 abaft and tremble through hull and rigging, and accom- 

 panied the whole with such a whining, and screeching, 

 and howling, as might have been taken for a revelry of 

 demons. Worse scenes than even these followed ; and 

 one of the chief of them will be best given in Back's 

 own graphic words. 



After describing two remarkable escapes from the 

 tremendous shocks of driving ice, hurled together like 

 mountain masses by an earthquake, he observes : " On 

 the 16th of March another rush drove irresistibly on 

 the larboard quarter and stern, and, forcing the ship 



