The pressure was tremendous, and on every side floes heaped up their debris on each other, and pinnacles forced into collision were ground into common ruin. Now shut out from view in darkness and storm, and now close at hand in the multitudinous shiftings of the ice, the immovable and gigantic buttresses of the ice-pool ground into powder acres of level floe, and bergs containing hundreds of thousands of tons of ice. Along that terrible line of impact rolled and heaved a chaos of mealy sludge and gigantic fragments, while from time to time a mass of many tons would be thrown, like a child's plaything, high up amid the debris already heaped along the inaccessible shore. Half a dozen times the startled voyagers seized their boat to drag her down from the berg, as the shore-ice gnawed into the sides of their narrowing ice-field.
At last a move appeared inevitable. The distance between their refuge and the shore was less than fifty yards, and in the gray of the morning they saw castle after castle crushed off by this fearful attrition, while high above their heads rose the ruin-strewed and inhospitable ice-foot.
"Stand by, lads, to move the boats, when I give the word. Look, Regnar! What is that above the cliff?"
"That a light-house, I think. Guess that on Cape Torment. No light there in winter; not many vessels here then."
"Yes, we are passing the capes, and not a mile distant is the hostelry of Tom Allan. Well, we can't land, that's certain; and as we can't, I hope we shall soon get into a wider channel. How the trees fly past! Ah, here the pressure lessens; we shall soon be above the narrows, and if the tide only serves--Good Heaven! what is that?"
An eddy seemed to catch the floe as he spoke, and whirling like a top, it brought between it and the shore a fantastically-shaped berg, at least twenty-five feet high. The "nip" was but momentary; but the lofty shaft and its floating base cracked like a mirror, the huge fabric fell into ruins, and one of its pieces, striking the smaller boat, crushed it into utter uselessness.
La Salle viewed the wreck of his little bark ruefully a moment.
"Well, the worst is over, and we are fortunate in losing so little, for it might have struck the larger boat, and that would have been indeed a loss. Come, boys, we have passed Cape Torment; let us pick some of those birds and get breakfast, for we shan't land this day, with an easterly gale hurrying the ice-pack thus to the north-west."