FROM EDINBURGH TO THE ANTARCTIC 
certainty in the working out of each detail, in the form of 
the icicles hanging from goblin mushrooms, in the green 
fret-work supporting white tables, that made us marvel at 
the skill of the design, and wonder what it was in this 
stillness that owned and enjoyed such grand and delicate 
beauty. Whilst we skirted this floating snow-land, the 
crew watched it from the black bulwarks, and were awed 
into silence by its unfamiliar beauty. The silence was 
broken by a whale rising between us and the ice ; he was 
about seventy feet long, I should guess. He spouted a jet 
of steam into the mist and went down. Some one called, 
1 He 's a Bowhead ! ' and every one forgot all about the ice 
and thought of whalebone and blubber and great profits. 
All the men who were not already on deck crowded on to 
the focsle-head at the shout, and waited to see the whale 
come up again — a silent group of intensely expectant 
figures, with the mist hanging grey on their clothes and 
beards, A second time he rose quite close to us, spouted, 
sighed heavily, rolled slowly over, and went down without 
showing enough of his back to let us know whether he 
was a finner or a right whale. Certainly his colour was 
not quite right — it was not black enough for a Bowhead ; 
still, the colour would not matter, we thought, if he had no 
fin on his back. The third time he rose higher, and just 
as he was going down a diminutive fin appeared, and a 
shout of laughter echoed in the misty stillness, and every 
one bundled off to his work jeering at the man who 
£ couldn't tell a Bowhead from a bl — y finner.' 
Think of all the dreary melancholy, the blank hopeless- 
ness described by writers about the Arctic, and you can have 
