第48章 LETTER VIII.(11)

Up to this time we had seen nothing of the island,yet I knew we must be within a very few miles of it;and now,to make things quite pleasant,there descended upon us a thicker fog than I should have thought the atmosphere capable of sustaining;it seemed to hang in solid festoons from the masts and spars.To say that you could not see your hand,ceased almost to be any longer figurative;even the ice was hid--except those fragments immediately adjacent,whose ghastly brilliancy the mist itself could not quite extinguish,as they glimmered round the vessel like a circle of luminous phantoms.The perfect stillness of the sea and sky added very much to the solemnity of the scene;almost every breath of wind had fallen,scarcely a ripple tinkled against the copper sheathing,as the solitary little schooner glided along at the rate of half a knot or so an hour,and the only sound we heard was the distant wash of waters,but whether on a great shore,or along a belt of solid ice,it was impossible to say.

In such weather,as the original discoverers of Jan Mayen said under similar circumstances,--"it was easier to hear land than to see it."Thus,hour after hour passed by and brought no change.Fitz and Sigurdr--who had begun quite to disbelieve in the existence of the island--went to bed,while I remained pacing up and down the deck,anxiously questioning each quarter of the grey canopy that enveloped us.At last,about four in the morning,I fancied some change was going to take place;the heavy wreaths of vapour seemed to be imperceptibly separating,and in a few minutes more the solid roof of grey suddenly split asunder,and I beheld through the gap--thousands of feet over--head,as if suspended in the crystal sky--a cone of illuminated snow.

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You can imagine my delight.It was really that of an anchorite catching a glimpse of the seventh heaven.There at last was the long-sought-for mountain actually tumbling down upon our heads.Columbus could not have been more pleased when,after nights of watching,he saw the first fires of a new hemisphere dance upon the water;nor,indeed,scarcely less disappointed at their sudden disappearance than I was,when,after having gone below to wake Sigurdr,and tell him we had seen bona fide terra-firma,I found,on returning upon deck,that the roof of mist had closed again,and shut out all trace of the transient vision.However,I had got a clutch of the island,and no slight matter should make me let go my hold.In the meantime there was nothing for it but to wait patiently until the curtain lifted;and no child ever stared more eagerly at a green drop-scene in expectation of "the realm of dazzling splendour"promised in the bill,than I did at the motionless grey folds that hung round us.At last the hour of liberation came:a purer light seemed gradually to penetrate the atmosphere,brown turned to grey,and grey to white,and white to transparent blue,until the lost horizon entirely reappeared,except where in one direction an impenetrable veil of haze still hung suspended from the zenith to the sea.Behind that veil I knew must lie Jan Mayen.

A few minutes more,and slowly,silently,in a manner you could take no count of,its dusky hem first deepened to a violet tinge,then gradually lifting,displayed a long line of coast--in reality but the roots of Beerenberg--dyed of the darkest purple;while,obedient to a common impulse,the clouds that wrapped its summit gently disengaged themselves,and left the mountain standing in all the magnificence of his 6,870feet,girdled by a single zone of pearly vapour,from underneath whose floating folds seven enormous glaciers rolled down into the sea!Nature seemed to have turned scene-shifter,so artfully were the phases of this glorious spectacle successively developed.

Although--by reason of our having hit upon its side instead of its narrow end--the outline of Mount Beerenberg appeared to us more like a sugar-loaf than a spire--broader at the base and rounder at the top than I had imagined,--in size,colour,and effect,it far surpassed anything I had anticipated.The glaciers were quite an unexpected element of beauty.Imagine a mighty river of as great a volume as the Thames--started down the side of a mountain,--bursting over every impediment,--whirled into a thousand eddies,--tumbling and raging on from ledge to ledge in quivering cataracts of foam,--then suddenly struck rigid by a power so instantaneous in its action,that even the froth and fleeting wreaths of spray have stiffened into the immutability of sculpture.Unless you had seen it,it would be almost impossible to conceive the strangeness of the contrast between the actual tranquillity of these silent crystal rivers and the violent descending energy impressed upon their exterior.You must remember,too,all this is upon a scale of such prodigious magnitude,that when we succeeded subsequently in approaching the spot--where with a leap like that of Niagara one of these glaciers plunges down into the sea--the eye,no longer able to take in its fluvial character,was content to rest in simple astonishment at what then appeared a lucent precipice of grey-green ice,rising to the height of several hundred feet above the masts of the vessel.