Читать книгу Round the Galley Fire онлайн

45 страница из 68

How would some of our summer-water mariners appear beside that salt-water sailor were they to have stood their trick at the helm on such an occasion as this; gazing to windward as yonder skipper is doing, holding on like grim death to a backstay, with the salt drying in crystals in his eyes; or making one of that oil-skinned group there to leeward of the galley, stamping their boots upon the deck to put life into their frozen toes, ducking as a shriek in the wind warns them of the passage of a green sheet of water over their heads, biting doggedly upon the tobacco in their cheeks, and growling as they reflect that another three hours must elapse before they are privileged to quit the deck and take such warmth and comfort as they may find in the forecastle, whose darkness is scarcely revealed by the sputtering slush-lamp, and whose beams and stanchions are decorated with draining clothes?

It was already blowing two or three ordinary gales in one, and the lower topsails were more than the brig could safely stagger under, though the captain held on, since by ratching to the northward he might hope to get clear of the ice, of which, on the previous night and that morning, some monstrous specimens had hove in view. Indeed, at one bell in the afternoon watch, during a flaw in a heavy squall of snow that was blowing in horizontal lines along the sea, they caught sight on the lee bow of the greenish marble-like glimmer of a berg that looked to be a mile long and as tall as St. Paul’s Cathedral. It vanished, but reappeared broad on the lee-beam when the squall passed, and stood out in its complete shape against the smoke-coloured gloom of the sky over the horizon, where, though it was four or five miles off, the men on the brig’s deck could see the white, steam-like haze of the spray that flashed in clouds from its base, and fled past it in eddying volumes, and almost imagine that they heard the thunder of the smiting surges reverberating in the hollows and caverns of the mighty frozen mass. But when it had drawn on the lee-quarter another squall blew up and smothered it, and after that it disappeared entirely.