Page:An Antarctic Mystery.pdf/83

Rh master. "It would have blown once or twice since we have been looking at it."

"Certainly!" assented Hardy. "Perhaps it is the carcase of some deserted ship."

"May the devil send it to the bottom!" cried Roger. "It would be a bad job to come up against it in the dark; it might send us down before we could know what had happened."

"I believe you," added Drap, "and these derelicts are more dangerous than a rock, for they are now here and again there, and there's no avoiding them."

Hurliguerly came up at this moment and planted his elbows on the bulwark, alongside of mine.

"What do you think of it, boatswain?" I asked.

"It is my opinion, Mr. Jeorling," replied the boatswain, "that what we see there is neither a blower nor a wreck, but merely a lump of ice."

"Hurliguerly is right," said James West; "it is a lump of ice, a piece of an iceberg which the currents have carried hither."

"What?" said I, "to the forty-fifth parallel?"

"Yes, sir," answered West, "that has occurred, and the ice sometimes gets up as high as the Cape, if we are to take the word of a French navigator. Captain Blosseville, who met one at this height in 1828."

"Then this mass will melt before long," I observed, feeling not a little surprised that West had honoured me by so lengthy a reply.

"It must indeed be dissolved in great part already," he continued, "and what we see is the remains of a mountain of ice which must have weighed millions of tons."

Captain Len Guy now appeared, and perceiving the