Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/642

212 reasonable man could expect, for sixty days. I then began to enter two remarks in the ship's log and in my journal; first, that there was an unusual and amazing quantity of ice; second, that the nights were most wonderfully dark, in spite of the ice.

For five days and a half, it seemed quite useless and hopless to alter the ship's course so as to stand out of the way of this ice. I made what southing I could; but all that time, we were beset by it. Mrs. Atherfield, after standing by me on deck once, looking for sometime in an awed manner at the great bergs that surrounded us, said in a whisper, "Oh! Captain Ravender, it looks as if the whole solid earth had changed into ice, and broken up!" I said to her, laughing, "I don't wonder that it does, to your inexperienced eyes, my dear." But I had never seen a twentieth part of the quantity, and, in reality, I was pretty much of her opinion.

However, at two p. m. on the afternoon of the sixth day, that is to say, when we were sixty-three days out, John Steadiman, who had gone aloft, sang out from the top that the sea was clear ahead. Before four p. m. a strong breeze springing up right astern, we were in open water at sunset. The breeze then freshening into half a gale of wind, and the Golden Mary being a very fast sailor, we went before the wind merrily, all night.

I had thought it impossible that it could be darker than it had been, until the sun, moon, and stars should fall out of the heavens, and time should be destroyed; but it had been next to light, in comparison with what it was now. The darkness was so profound, that looking into it was painful and oppressive—like looking, without a ray of light, into a dense black bandage put as close before the eyes as it could be, without touching them. I doubled the look-out, and John and I stood in the bow side by side, never leaving it all night. Yet I should no more have known that he was near me when he was silent, without putting out my arm and touching him, than I should if he had turned in and been fast asleep below. We were not so much looking out, all of us, as listening to the utmost, both with our eyes and oars.

Next day, I found that the mercury in the barometer, which had risen steadily since we cleared the ice, remained steady. I had had very good observations with