She sank into silence with her eyes fastened upon the deck. When I offered her food she shook her head. My breakfast consisted of half a cup of coffee.
Within a quarter of an hour I was on deck again, but the scene was the same as before, saving that the ice mountain that had been upon our starboard bow was now right ahead, whilst on our starboard quarter, within perhaps half a mile, was a small island of ice, about sixty feet high, not before visible. The compass gave me the wind blowing steadily from one quarter. But then I could make nothing of bearings within three or four points on board a helpless hull, swinging in a high sea, with a send of her head when she was rushed out of a hollow that made me sometimes think she was going to give her stern to the weather.
At one o'clock it was a savage and tremendous scene of warring waters and flying sky of soot, and giant forms of ice vanishing and reappearing amid headlong flights of wool-white vapour, and through all, in deep notes, ran the thunder of the surge-smitten, frozen heights, with frequent rending and crashing noises of dislocation. I was now very sure that our drift was not less than three miles an hour, and perhaps four. This I gathered by observing a vast shape of ice that suddenly showed off the starboard bow. It was nearly a mile long, and I should think two hundred feet high. It was a grand, truly sublime ocean piece, with its numerous lofty arches and caverns, out of which the sea, in recoil, flashed in immense bursts of foam. I spied the white wings of birds glancing upon it, but I had it not often very clear in sight, for the steam-like smother drove down at quick intervals, leaving some pale eminence gleaming on high against the whirl of the clouds, to vanish in some swift outfly of snow, so that the whole thing would be as completely gone to the eye as if it had sunk.
But by staying and watching it as often as it emerged in whole or in part, I got at the rate of our drift. It was quickly on our port bow with others coming out of the thickness to leeward, all wild and terrific in that dull light of storm, with the glare of the leaping foam at their base and their own ghastly stare through the rent curtains of cloud flying under the dark sky.