Page:Life with the Esquimaux - 1864 - Volume 1.djvu/106

Rh "August 6th.—Going on deck this morning, found Nature again on a spree. I have been observing its working for two hours. I will record some of its phenomena.

"When I first observed the unnatural appearance of the bergs, sea, and islands toward the southwest, the morning sun was ten degrees high, and shining brightly. The barometer then stood 29&middot;35 inches, the thermometer 41°, wind blowing moderately from south-west. Looking to windward, I saw the top of a distant berg; then all at once a snow-white spot, not larger than a pin's head, appeared in the clouds hanging directly over the berg. In few seconds it enlarged to the size of an Egyptian pyramid inverted. At every roll of the vessel this resplendently white pyramid seemed to descend and kiss the sea, and then as often ascended again to its celestial throne.

"Dioptrics, the science of refracted light, may satisfactorily account for all this, but I very much doubt it. Some land that was seventy-five miles distant, and the top of it only barely seen in an ordinary way, had its rocky base brought full in view. The whole length of this land in sight was the very symbol of distortion. Pendent from an even line that stretches along the heavens was a ridge of mountains. 'Life hangs upon a little thread,' but what think you of mountains hanging upon a thread? In my fancy I said, If Fate had decreed one of the sisters to cut that thread while I witnessed the singular spectacle, what convulsions upon the land and the sea about us might not have followed? But Nature had an admirable way of taking down these rock giants hanging between the heavens and the earth. Arch after arch was at length made in wondrous grandeur from that rugged and distorted atmospheric land; and if ever man's eye rested upon the sublime, in an act of God's creative power, it was when He arcuated the heavens with such a line of stupendous mountains! Between these several mountain arches in the sky were hung icebergs, also inverted, moving silently and majestically about as the sea-currents drifted those along of which they were the images. In addition to all this there was