Tom Finchs Monkey, and how he dined with the Admiral | Page 9

further north they become more numerous and of larger dimensions, until, as you pass the entrance of some of those great fjords, or inlets, which intersect the Greenland coast-line, they pour out in such numbers that the wary mariner is thankful for the continuous daylight and summer seas that enable him so easily to avoid these floating rocks. Here are several broken-up ones floating about in the Waigat, a narrow strait between the island of Disco and the mainland of Greenland, and in close vicinity to several fjords noted for sending big bergs adrift in the channel way to float southward. These are the `ice- mountains' of the fancy artist. One ashore close into the land, and yet not stranded or on account of its depth in the water getting into any very shallow soundings, you may see in your mind's eye, as I've seen them scores of times in reality. It presents to your notice a dull white mass of untransparent ice--not transparent, with objects to be seen through it on the other side, as I have noticed in more than one picture of the North Pole taken by an artist on the spot! This mass is generally jagged at the top with saw-like edges, and it doesn't so very much resemble those Gothic cathedral spires as Arctic writers try to make out. Still, on the whole, the shape of this monster floating mass of ice is very striking to those seeing it for the first time; and when you come to look at it more closely, its size and general character lose nothing by having the details ciphered down, as a Yankee skipper would say."
"Are the icebergs very big?" I inquired.
"Well," said the old gentleman, quite pleased at being asked for information on the subject, and evidently wishing to convert me to his own practical way of thinking in opposition to Arctic fiction-mongers, "they may sometimes be seen of a hundred and fifty feet high, occasionally reaching to a couple of hundred, while sometimes I've seen an iceberg that towered up more than double that height; but the majority of them do not exceed a hundred feet at most. The colour, as I've said, is not emerald green, as most folks think--that is, not unless it is seen under what science-folks call the prismatic action of light--but a dull white that is almost opaque. The sides are, generally, dripping with the little streams of water formed by the melting of the ice, and glistening in the rays of the sun; but a dull white is the principal colour of the mass. Its base is broader than its summit, and is here and there hollowed into little caverns by the action of the waves. The pinnacles seen in the pictures of the illustrated papers I've spoken of are not very plain. Indeed, both the one we are supposing and the other bergs, that are always, like the `birds of a feather' of the proverb, to be seen close together, are flattened on the top; and if here and there worn into fantastic shapes by the weather, they mostly go back to a shape which may be roughly described as broader at the base than the top; otherwise the berg would speedily capsize. When this happens, they go over with a tremendous splash, rocking and churning up the sea for miles round, and sending wave circles spreading and widening out as from the whirlpool in the centre, in the same way as when a child pitches a stone into a pond.
"On some of the bergs are masses of earth, gravel and stone, proving that they must lately have been connected with the land; for owing to the old bergs becoming undermined by the waves, they soon turn over, and so of course send their load to the bottom. An examination of the sides of the ice-mass also shows to the eye some other peculiarities. The greater part of the ice is white and thoroughly full of air-bubbles, which lie in very thin lines parallel to each other; but throughout the white ice there are numerous slight cracks or streaks, of an intensely blue and transparent ice, which, on being exposed to heat, before melting, I've been told by the surgeon of the ship I was in, dissolve into large angular grains. These blue cracks cross and cross over again in the mass of the berg, and may possibly be water which has melted and been frozen again either on the surface of the berg, or in its crevasses or cracks, when it was a part of the glacier from which it first came. But, besides the blue ice, in some icebergs may be seen a kind of conglomerate of ice-blocks of various sizes, the spaces between them being filled up