Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/84

 raising a swell which set us rocking to and fro as if in a gale of wind, and left us grinding in the débris of the crumbling ruin.

At last we succeeded in extricating ourselves, and were far enough away to look back calmly upon the object of our terror. It was still rocking and rolling like a thing of life. At each revolution fresh masses were disengaged; and, as its sides came up in long sweeps, great cascades tumbled and leaped from them hissing into the foaming sea. After several hours it settled down into quietude, a mere fragment of its former greatness, while the pieces that were broken from it floated quietly away with the tide.

Whether it was the waves created by the dissolution which I have just described, or the sun's warm rays, or both combined, I cannot pretend to say, but the day was filled with one prolonged series of reports of crumbling icebergs. Scarcely had we been moored in safety when a very large one about two miles distant from us, resembling in its general appearance the British House of Parliament, began to go to pieces. First a lofty tower came plunging into the water, starting from their inhospitable perch an immense flock of gulls, that went screaming up into the air; over went another; then a whole side settled squarely down; then the wreck capsized, and at length after five hours of rolling and crashing, there remained of this splendid mass of congelation not a fragment that rose fifty feet above the water. Another, which appeared to be a mile in length and upwards of a hundred feet in height, split in two with a quick, sharp, and at length long rumbling report, which could hardly have been exceeded by a thousand pieces of artillery simultaneously discharged, and the two frag