She looked intently upward. Above her she could see a shoulder of ice projecting outward, and it seemed so disposed to the central trunk of ice as to suggest that it surrounded it with a sort of lower platform. If she could surmount this the wider circuit of vision would enable her to form her plans. The task was not easy. The wall of ice at her very face was steep and actually inclined outwards, and the nearest margin of its pendent edges was thirty feet away.
Lhatto studied the problem, but it was an impossible physical feat to ascend the glassy slope. The iceberg, with occasional shuddering thrills which broke the snow loose from its higher parts, sending down white showers upon the startled woman, was slowly veering seaward. The circling eddies around its edges betrayed its motion. It even seemed that the shelf on which she stood was being invaded by the sea water. Her boat, a few minutes ago dry on the ice, was now partially surrounded by water. Her dismay increased. Running almost hopelessly to and fro, a waif of humanity in the great arctic world, straining her eyes from the extremities of the tipping shelf where she stood, to see if possible what surmounted the platform above her, which she desired to reach, her eye noted a horn-like projection of cylindrical ice, suddenly revealed by one of the discharges of the powdery snow above.
It was a stalactitic formation of ice extending outward like the round limb of a tree. Lhatto’s eye detected here an opportunity. Wound around the long harpoon she had brought, were many feet of strongly woven cord, a provision made by her people in their hunting excursions, when their prey dove or swam from them. It was attached to the harpoon blade, and the device contemplated a separation of the blade from the stock or handle which floated to the surface, though still united by this long thong to the wounded animal, seeking escape below the water.
Lhatto quickly unwound this cord, severed it from the stock and blade and threw one end over the uprising and ringent projection. In another instant she had looped the other end about her thighs, pulled the noose tightly around her limbs, and then, seizing the disengaged end, drew herself upward as a trapeze performer does to-day in a circus ring.