Afternoon by the Ice 269 



stroking the great ship as if she were a sick sheep. "She is hurting 

 here. 'Bout twa ells below," he called, and he pointed down into 

 the ice. 



Without a word Angus MacNeil picked up a harpoon, and pacing 

 off twenty feet from where the lad Arrach was clinging to the ship's 

 side, he described a semicircle around him on the ice. 



"Now break the muck out!" he shouted. Then he attacked the ice 

 with a pick, starting at the farthest point. 



And as the dozen men labored, noises like the discharges of blun- 

 derbusses would, every now and then, shatter the silence, and show- 

 ers of smashed ice would burst into the air and go tinkHng off across 

 the flow. So great was the pressure that the whole area threatened 

 to heave up and split right under their feet. But eventually someone 

 broke through into a horizontal crack and the whole place came 

 apart. Great sheets of clear ice seemed to crawl out of the previously 

 smooth surface as if possessed and moved across one another. The 

 ship gave a tremendous shudder and let out a tortured scream. Her 

 yards rocked back and forth aloft and more ice shifted. The men 

 jumped back and waited, but the movements went on with that slow 

 inexorableness known only to ice. There was thunder in the air and 

 beneath their feet. Then, slowly the upheaval subsided and all was 

 quiet again. 



"Now get her side cleared!" the mate barked. "Only He knows 

 how long we may have." 



And once again all hands turned-to with picks, grapples, and lines 

 like ants attacking a continent of sugar. But a few minutes later they 

 heard the sound of water running. A plank, right on the water line 

 and just exactly two ells below the surface of the ice, was completely 

 stove-in, disclosing a shattered timber to one side and an inwardly 

 bulging sealing plank to the other. The icy arctic waters were flow- 

 ing silently into this gaping hole as into a millrace, and they were 

 splashing on into the bilges within the ship like a waterfall. The 

 entire company sprang into action. 



And so busy were they all, lowering a mat to the hole and bolting 

 and pinning timbers over it before the ice should close in again, that 

 nobody saw the incredible procession that had been approaching 

 them from the west. The first notice they had of it was a raucous 

 metallic blast. The vital work momentarily forgotten, all hands 



