0 
PROCESSION OF THE BERGS. 467 
a millrace. The comparison was a wretched one. 
Imagine the horizon a great sea, visible here and there 
at the end of long marble vistas, one unbroken but 
moving whiteness. Let that sea be choked with jag- 
ged mountains, pale and chalky, but moving too. It 
is the panorama that surrounds us. They are not the 
same bergs that girded us a week ago. It is a con- 
stant series : as fast as one column passes another takes 
its place. At this moment, looking to the north, I rec- 
ognize the terraces of a Baby Ionic tower, just losing 
itself behind the fast bergs to seaward. Yesterday 
that same berg emerged from the solid ice-mountain 
to the southward. Then it was the last of a long cav- 
alcade ; but they have all gone, and another train is 
now following it, so continuous and compact that I • 
sometimes can not see the horizon. The procession, 
like a phantasmagorial dream of some giant theatre, 
glides slowly in from the left, passes across the front, 
and is lost far back to the right. 
“ Night before last, standing on the fast floe, I 
counted, between the two anchored bergs that serve 
as framings of the picture, thirty-two icebergs in a 
well-marshaled group. Standing afterward on the 
summit of our northern buttress, I counted two hund- 
red and eighty, the glacier terminating the eastern 
view. Most of these bergs were above the standard 
height of two hundred and fifty feet ; some exceeded 
three hundred ; few were less than one hundred. 
“We see no open water; but it is designated clearly 
by a dark sky, something between the bistre of the 
frost, smoke and the indigo of our thunder clouds at 
home. The tint is deepest at the horizon, and fading 
as it ascends. We have seen these signs of water for 
the last four days. We confidently hope the south- 
