APPENDIX. 
407 
Banquise. It was only by steering to the S. W. that 
we got free from the floating icebergs, to resume our 
former course as soon as the sea was clear. 
The further we advanced to the northward, the 
thicker became the fog and more intense the cold (two 
degrees centig. below zero); the snow whirled round in 
squalls of wind, and fell in large flakes on the deck. 
The ice began to present a new aspect, and to assume 
those fantastic and terrible forms and colours, which 
painters have made familiar to us. At one time it 
assumed the appearance of mountain-peaks covered with 
snow, furrowed with valleys of green and blue; more 
frequently they appeared like a wide flat plateau, as 
high as the ship’s deck, against which the sea rolled 
with fury, hollowing its edges into gulfs, or breaking 
them into perpendicular cliffs or caverns, into which the 
sea rushed in clouds of foam. 
We often passed close by a herd of seals, which— 
stretched on these floating islands, followed the ship 
with a stupid and puzzled look. We were forcibly 
struck with the contrast between the fictitious world 
in which we lived on board the ship, and the terrible 
realities of nature that surrounded us. Lounging in 
an elegant saloon, at the corner of a clear and sparkling 
fire, amidst a thousand objects of the arts and luxuries 
of home, we might have believed that we had not 
changed our residence, or our habits, or our enjoyments. 
One of Strauss’s waltzes, or Schubert’s melodies— 
played on the piano by the band-master—completed 
the illusion; and yet we had only to rub off the thin 
incrustation of frozen vapour that covered the panes of 
the windows, to look out upon the gigantic and terrible 
forms of the icebergs dashed against each other by a 
black and broken sea, and the whole panorama of Polar 
nature, its awful risks, and its sinister splendours. 
