Five Nights | Page 4

and radiant with the pure light of the North,
unshaded, unsoftened by the smallest mist or cloud. The silence was
unbroken except for the regular thunder of the falling bergs, that

continued with absolute precision at the five-minute interval, and the
accompanying splash of the water. I walked on up the strand, having
the great glistening wall of the glacier's face somewhat on my left. It
was impossible to approach it on land, as the fervid green water lay
deep all about its base. It was only at the side of the inlet that little
beaches had been formed, and on one of these I stood. The steamer
could not get nearer the glacier for fear of the floating bergs, and a
small boat could only approach with deadliest peril at the risk of being
crushed beneath the falling ice or swamped by the wild division and
upheaval of the water that it caused.
But here, on the beach, was a world of enchantment second only in
beauty to the glacier itself, for many of the bergs had been stranded
there by the playful tides. They stood there now towering up in a
thousand different forms, hundreds of feet above one's head, drawing
all the light of the sunbeams into their glittering recesses, turning them
there into violet, purple, and crimson hues, mauve, saffron, and emerald,
blood-red and topaz, and then throwing them out in a million lance-like
rays of colour, dazzling and blinding the vision. Like the most
wonderful rainbows turned into solid masses they stood there, or like
the jewels, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds broken from some giant's
crown and scattered recklessly along the strand.
I went up to them and walked beneath an ice arch that glowed rose
without as the sun touched it and deepest violet within. Then on, into a
cave beyond where the last chamber was coldest white but the outer
rim seemed hung with blood-red fire and the middle wall glowed
deepest emerald. On, on from one to another, each like a perfect dream
of exquisite colour: sunrise and sunset, and all the hues of earth that we
ever see were blended together in those glorious bergs.
What a phantasmagoria of colour, what a wonderful vision! Wrapped
up in the delight of it, I passed on through some and round others,
pursuing my way up the beach, and ascended slowly the rocks, the
huge morain at the side of the glacier, while impressively from the inlet
came unvaryingly the thunder of the five-minute guns, hastening my
steps, dogging them, as it were, with warning of the passing time.

After a heavy climb taken too quickly, when I put my foot first on the
clear blue-green surface of the glacier, its immensity, its grandeur came
home to me. The idea of the huge size of it seems to take the human
mind in a curious grip and appal it. Three hundred and fifty square
miles of ice stretched round me, white, unbroken, except here and there
where gigantic fissures and ravines opened in its surface; ravines where
deep blue-green colour glowed in the sides, as if it were the blue-green
blood of the glacier. A tiny wind from the north, keen as a knife blade,
blew in my face as I stood there, out of the calm blue sky, and seemed
to whisper to me of the terrifying nights of storm, of the deadly wind
before which all life goes down like a straw, that raged here in the
winter. On every side, as far as the eyes could reach, wide white plains
of undulating ice and snow, broken here and there by patches of barren
rock, that seemed now by some optical delusion, against the glaring
white, to be of the brightest mauve and violet tints. Only that; ice and
snow and rock for mile upon mile, until the tale of three hundred and
fifty is told. No track or trace of bird, no sweet companionship of little
furred, four-footed things, no blade of grass or smallest plant or flower,
no sound but the roar of the riven ice, the groans of the dying glacier.
I walked on slowly, looking inland towards the white fields stretching
away endlessly into the distance till the blue of the sky seems to come
down and mingle with the blue shadows in the snow. Beneath my feet
glimmered sometimes the green glass-like surface of smooth ice, at
others the thin crisp covering of drifted snow crackled at every step.
Sometimes the crevasses were so narrow one could easily walk over
them, others yawned widely, many yards across, necessitating a long
detour to pass round them.
Looking back from the side of one of them as I walked up it to find the
narrowest part, I saw the objectionable black