190 WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 



a hundred and fifty feet high, with lofty blue caves into 

 which you could sail a ship, the sea bursting up their green 

 depths from a huge glassy swell, around them small ice 

 like ruined Greek temples, floating lightly as feathers, such 

 marvellous forms ! Here the ice is pretty, very pretty 

 indeed, but there is nothing awesome or staggeringly 

 wonderful in its design. 



We steamed north-westerly all forenoon ; a thin haze came 

 down in the afternoon and the sun through the haze on 

 the ice-floes gives quite a fairylike appearance, even to our 

 somewhat rugged figures, when we scatter over the ice-floe, 

 which we did, and enjoyed the feeling of land, as it were. 

 Bump ! That would have upset an ink-bottle ; now we lie 

 still, up against a floe with the Fonix's nose against the 

 dazzling blue under-cut edge, and we throw the ice-anchor 

 and wire-cable over the bows and hammer it into the ice. 

 Later we towed her stern round and lay broadside to the 

 floe and put out planks for a gangway, and filled up our 

 water-tanks from a pale cobalt pond of fresh water. We 

 broke a bottle of champagne at this point of our proceedings 

 and we all agreed it tasted rather .better in the snow than 

 down South, and we shot at the empty bottle, and practised 

 lasso-throwing, getting our eye in against a rencontre with 

 seal or bear. Our little white ship that seemed so insigni- 

 ficant down in Tromso now seems to rather dominate the 

 ice and seascape twenty people inside the little vessel, 

 engines, harpoons, rifles, coals, heat and food, quite a con- 

 centrated little cosmos of life and human contrivances 

 our all, in this wide, empty Arctic world. 



Later we pushed on and the mist obscured our path again, 

 so we tied up against another floe, with shallow lakes of pale 

 Reckitt's blue on it. Far id towards its centre two seals 

 lay on the snow, mere black dots, which I was about to go 

 after, when, observing a smile on the face of Larsen, a typical 

 blue-eyed hirsute Viking, I consulted with him and gathered 

 it was " no use." " Hole in de ice," he said, " dey go intil I " 

 Stupid beasts ! I thought, there are points in favour 

 of the great tame creatures of the Antarctic which one 

 could approach and pat on the head before turning them 



