Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/476

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in the air, changing shape with each changing moment. Distant icebergs and floating ice-fields, and coast-lines and mountains were thus brought into view; sometimes preserving for a moment their natural shapes, then widening or lengthening, rising and falling as the wind fluttered or fell calm over the sea. The changes were as various as the dissolving images of a kaleidoscope, and every form of which the imagination could conceive stood out against the sky. At one moment a sharp spire, the prolonged image of a distant mountain-peak, would shoot up; and this would fashion itself into a cross, or a spear, or a human form, and would then die away, to be replaced by an iceberg which appeared as a castle standing upon the summit of a bill, and the ice-fields coming up with it flanked it on either side, seeming at one moment like a plain dotted with trees and animals; again, as rugged mountains; and then, breaking up after a while, disclosing a long line of bears and dogs and birds and men dancing in the air, and skipping from the sea to the skies. To picture this strange spectacle were an impossible task. There was no end to the forms which appeared every instant, melting into other shapes as suddenly. For hours we watched the "insubstantial pageant," until a wind from the north ruffled the sea; when, with its first breath, the whole scene melted away as quickly as the "baseless fabric" of Prospero's "vision;" and from watching these dissolving images, and wooing the soft air, we were, in a couple of hours, thrashing to windward through a fierce storm of rain and hail, under close-reefed sails.

We had some ugly knocking about and some narrow escapes in the thick atmosphere, before we