REFRACTION. 
127 
About an hour after this necromantic juggie, the 
whole horizon became distorted : great bergs lifted 
themselves above it, and a pearly sky and pearly 
water blended with each other in such a way, that 
you could not determine where the one began or the 
other ended. Your ship was in the concave of a vast 
sphere ; ice shapes of indescribable variety around you, 
floating, like yourself, on nothingness ; the flight of a 
bird as apparent in the deeps of the sea as in the 
continuous element above. Nothing could be more 
curiously beautiful than our consort the Rescue, as 
she lay in mid-space, duplicated by her secondary im- 
age. 
This unequally refractive condition continued on 
into the next day ; diminishing as the sun approached 
his meridian altitude, but again coming back in the 
afternoon with augmented intensity. The appearance 
at night was more wonderful than it had been on the 
12th. I am desirous to give the impressions it made 
on me at the moment, and I therefore copy again 
from my journal, without erasing or modifying a sin- 
gle line. 
August 13. To-night, at ten o'clock, we were op- 
posite a striking cliff, supposed to be Cape Melville, 
when, attracted by the irregular radiation from the 
sun, then about two hours from the lowest point of 
his curve, I saw suddenly flaring up all around him 
the signs of active combustion. Great volumes of 
black smoke rose above the horizon, narrowing and 
expanding as it rolled away. Black specks, to which 
the eye, by its compensation for distance, gave the size 
of masses, mingled with it, rising and falling, appear- 
ing and disappearing ; and above all this was the pe- 
culiar waving movement of air, rarefied by an adjacent 
