THE NARWHALS. 
343 
faithful satellite, for a bright plain, glittering in the 
low sunshine some three miles to the west, a new di- 
rection. We did not get back till eight. 
“Let me make a picture for you without a jot of 
fancy about it, and you may get H. to put it into col- 
ors if he can. The sun was low, very low ; and his 
long, slanting beams, of curious indescribable purple, 
fell upon old Blinn and myself as we sat on a crag 
of ice Avhich overhung the sea. The chasm was per- 
haps a mile wide, and the opposite ice-shores were 
so painted by the glories of the sunshine, that they ap- 
peared like streaks of flame, licking continuous water. 
The place to which we had worked ourselves had been 
subjected to forces which no one could realize, so cha- 
otic, and enormous, and incomprehensible were they. 
A line of old floe, eight feet thick and four miles long, 
had been powdered into a pedragal of crushed sugar, 
rising up in great efflorescing knobs fifteen and twen- 
ty feet high ; and from amid these, like crystal rocks 
from the foam of a cataract, came transparent tables 
of blue ice, floating, as it were, on unsubstantial white- 
ness. Some of these blocks measured eight feet in 
thickness by twenty-two long, and of indeterminate 
depth, one side being obliquely buried in the ma.ss. 
On one of these tables, that stretched out like a glass 
spear-point, directly over the water, were straddled 
your brother and his companion. Underneath us the 
narwhals were passing almost within pole-reach. As 
they rolled over, much after the fashion of our own 
porpoises, I could see the markings of their backs, and 
the great suction of their jaws throwing the water into 
eddies. Seal, breast-high, were treading water with 
their horizontal tails, and the white whale was blow- 
ing purple sprays into the palpable sunshine. 
