Page:Polar Exploration - Bruce - 1911.djvu/76

72 by sea and wind. There can be no more terrific experience than a storm in a living polar pack. No human power is of any avail in resisting the combined onslaught of wind, sea, and heavy ice.

Yet I know no scene more wonderful and more stimulating than one of those brilliant sunny days in fine weather in the pack either in the north or the south. The dazzling ice shines like brilliants in the sun. Seals and penguins on the ice bask in the sun or play around pieces of pack ice, in and out, and over and under "tongues," in the intensely clear and often intensely bright blue water. In the south small shrimplike creatures (Euphausia), and in the north the midget polar cod, can be seen darting about in and out of the honeycombed ice tongues projecting under water from almost every piece of pack ice, probably sustaining themselves on diatoms and other algæ that are there too, and which stain the pure ice with a rusty brown colour near the surface of the sea. Snowy petrels, cape pigeons, and Wilson's stormy petrel in the south, and ivory gulls, kittiwakes and burgomaster gulls in the north fly gaily in the blue sunlit sky, speckled with thin wisps and flakes of cirrus clouds. Penguins in the south and guillemots and puffins in the north dart like torpedoes in the narrow lanes of water, only coming to