Ice King

“ It was obviously impossible for two little mites to kiss a man of that height at that distance. Chip dropped into an arm-chair, waiting jealously for the two dutiful little pecks that might pass as spontaneous, and then throwing his big arms about his young ones in a desperate embrace. After that the ice was broken, and, with the aid of the games and the picture-books provided by Lily Bland, the meeting could go forward to a glorious termination in ice-cream. ”

“ One stinging wintry evening, when the wind was whistling from the northwest and a cold wave of most approved and vicious pattern had swooped down on Chicago, when the pavements were coated with ice and the populace with extra garments, and the visible features of pedestrians were unbecomingly red, a tall, soldierly-looking man, garbed in furs, was patrolling an up-town street and keeping anxious watch across the way. ”

“ Cold and gray in the mist of the morning the long columns have filed down from the heights, and are massed at the water's edge. It is chill December, and the frost has eaten deep into the ruddy soil of Virginia, but the Rappahannock flows swiftly along, uncrusted by the ice that fetters Northern streams, yet steaming in the biting air. Fog-wreaths rise from the rippling surface, and all along the crowded shore the clouds hang dense and heavy. Nowhere can one see in any direction more than a dozen yards away; all beyond is wrapped in swirling, eddying fog-bank. ”

“ Anxious are all of us to depart for the States, but King Ice will not yet let us go. A good 'nor'wester' would drive away the pack which presses so closely and so unrelentingly the west side of Davis's Strait, and allow the ice which holds dominion over the George Henry's pathway to the sea to give way. It may be the pack will keep us here another year; but I hope not. I trust in two weeks more we shall be on our way home, there to prepare for the voyage I have so much at heart. God grant an early deliverance from our ice-foe. ”

“ The guide, as guides are given to do, lied cheerfully and insistently every yard of the way, about the beauty of the lake, the countless deer and grouse upon its shores, the gigantic fish within its ice-cold depths, the game he, and parties he had guided, had killed, and the fish they had caught. He did well with these minor subjects, but when he touched upon moose and bear he rose to the sublime, and lied with a wild abandon which made Moeran seriously consider the advantage of upsetting the canoe later on and quietly drowning him. ”

“ For in this wretched extremity of the earth, situated beyond every thing that we conceived to be most barbarous and inhospitable, and as it were out of the very reach of civilization, barricadoed with ice and covered with summer snow, in a poor miserable port far inferior to the meanest of our fishing towns, we met with feelings of humanity, joined to a greatness of mind and elevation of sentiment, which would have done honour to any nation or climate. ”

“ We sunk at every step almost knee-deep in the snow, and though we found tolerable footing at the bottom, yet the weak parts of the ice not being discoverable, we were constantly exposed to the risk of breaking through it. ”

“ Our experience at Saint Peter and Saint Paul enabled us to judge what might be expected farther north; and upon that ground we had reason to doubt, whether the continents might not in winter be even joined by the ice; and this agreed with the stories we heard in Kamtschatka, that on the Siberian coast they go out from the shore in winter, upon the ice, to greater distances than the breadth of the sea is, in some parts, from one continent to the other. ”

“ At eight in the forenoon, it blew a strong gale from the west south-west, and brought us under double-reefed top-sails; when, the weather clearing a little, we found ourselves embayed; the ice having taken a sudden turn to the south-east, and in one compact body surrounding us on all sides, except on the south quarter. We therefore hauled our wind to the southward, being at this time in latitude 70° 8ʹ N. and in twenty-six fathoms’ water; and, as we supposed, about twenty-five leagues from the coast of America. ”

“ Applied to the under side of a tent or awning, it reduces by three-fourths the amount of heat from the sun which gets through the cloth, while if used on the cover of an automobile or ice wagon it cuts in half the heat let through and makes the temperature inside the vehicle more nearly that found in natural shade, thereby making it much more comfortable. ”

“ There's a queer blight as creeps inter our country, which without thet might be like everlasting Paradise. Ourn is a land of summer an' flowers, but up here in this ice-bound region, the air is like water in runnin' brooks, it puts life an' health in ye. ”

“ And much more should we be led to do so; when, to these observations, and testimonies, concerning showers of hot burning stones, is added the consideration; that within the short period of our own lives, incredibly large real hail-stones, formed of consolidated ice;—of ice consolidated in the atmosphere, have fallen both in France, and in England. ”

“ The town of Bolcheretsk is about eighty miles from Natcheekin; and we were informed, that, in the summer season, when the river has been full and rapid, from the melting of snow on the mountains, the canoes had often gone down in a single day; but that, in its present state, we should probably be much longer, as the ice had broken up only three days before we arrived; and that our’s would be the first boat that had attempted to pass. This intelligence proved but too true. We found ourselves greatly impeded by the shallows ”

“ Young hunters and young girls, men and women, who had once perished in the glacier, stood there living, with open eyes and smiling mouth; deep below them chimed from buried towns the peal of church bells; under the arches of the churches knelt the congregation; pieces of ice formed the organ pipes, and the mountain stream played the organ. On the clear transparent ground sat the Ice-Maiden; she raised herself towards Rudy, kissed his feet, and the coldness of death ran through his limbs and gave him an electric shock—ice and fire. ”

“ The ancient Arctic mariner will tell you that an iceberg can sail against the wind as well as with it! Gripped for two-thirds of its bulk by a strong under-current, it can crash its way and forge ahead against the wildest adverse gale. An old whaler told of an experience he had when his ship was beset by the loose floe, and like to be crushed to matchwood. The men were striving all they knew to get her into safety, when a vast berg drove slowly down beside her through the ice, shouldering it aside as a giant liner drives through a heavy sea. ”

“ None of the crew would accompany me: my mess-mates did not volunteer: so I was alone.
“It was a walk to be remembered. Snow up to the neck; drift moist and blinding; and a gale, luckily not a cold one, in my face. But after a mile of such promenading as no other region can boast of, I reached the water at last. Water it was; dark, surging water; no pellicles of glazing ice; no sludgy streams of pancake; but the liquid element itself, such as we saw last summer, and you see every day, stretching out as broad as the Delaware, and in contrast with the snow at its margin as black as Styx. ”

“ Wade steered by his last glimpse, — by the current, —by the rush of the roaring wind, — by instinct.
How merciful that in such a moment a man is spared the agony of thought! His agony goes into action, intense as life.
It was bitterly cold. A swash of ice-water filled the bottom of the skiff. She was low enough down without that. They could not stop to bail, and the miniature icebergs they passed began to look significantly over the gunwale. Which would come to the point of foundering first, the boat or the little floe it aimed for? ”

“ A fresh wind makes the cold very unbearable. In walking to-day, my beard and mustache became one solid mass of ice. I inadvertently put out my tongue, and it instantly froze fast to my lip. This being nothing new, costing only a smart pull and a bleeding abrasion afterward, I put up my mittened hands to ‘blow hot’ and thaw the unruly member from its imprisonment. Instead of succeeding, my mitten was itself a mass of ice in a moment: it fastened on the upper side of my tongue, and flattened it out like a batter-cake between the two disks of a hot griddle. ”

“ When Âtârssuaq’s son came to this, he climbed up, by sticking his hands into the ice. And up above were two large pieces. And when he came close to the iceberg, he heard those in the kayaks saying among themselves:
“We can cut steps in the ice, and climb up to him.”
And they began cutting steps in the iceberg, and at last the ice pick of the foremost came up over the edge. But now the boy took one of the great pieces of ice and threw it down upon them as they crawled up, so that it sent them all down again as it fell. And again he heard them say:
“It would be very foolish not to kill him. ”

“ Through a thousand generations stern necessity has taught certain things to the Eskimos, and the explorers who most nearly follow their methods are the ones who winter in safety and with least loss of life and comfort.
Still in imitation of the ice-dwellers of the far north, they made the only entrance to this big igloo through a low tunnel of ice cakes, well chinked and mortared with snow and water, and with a deerskin doorway that dropped curtainwise and could be fastened tight. ”

“ Picking up several Eskimo families and about two hundred and fifty dogs, they steamed on northwards.
"Imagine," says Peary—"imagine about three hundred and fifty miles of almost solid ice, ice of all shapes and sizes, mountainous ice, flat ice, ragged and tortured ice; then imagine a little black ship, solid, sturdy, compact, strong, and resistant, and on this little ship are sixty-nine human beings, who have gone out into the crazy, ice-tortured channel between Baffin Bay and the Polar sea—gone out to prove the reality of a dream in the pursuit of which men have frozen and starved and died." ”

“ On they came, seemingly at a great pace, and one heard a crunching noise as the hoofs of the ponies trod down the snow crust, but one could not hear the footfalls of the men. One exchanged a "Hallo" with the leading man and passed on until a much bigger white shape loomed up in the obscurity of the noon-twilight, the going underfoot changed and skis fetched up against a great lump of ice which was scarcely discernible in the confusing darkness, and one realised that what little light there was to the northward had been blotted out by one of the big grounded icebergs. ”

“ The Ice-Maiden sat in her noble palace, which grows in the winter; the rocky walls were coated with ice, there were icicles ponderous as elephants where in the summer the mountain-torrent poured its watery deluge; ice-garlands of fantastic ice-crystals glittered on the snow-powdered67 fir-trees. The Ice-Maiden rode on the whistling wind across the deepest valleys. The snow carpet was spread quite down to Bex, and she could come there and see Rudy within doors, more than he was accustomed to, for he sat with Babette. ”

“ Don't you remember about that Eskimo igloo that they had built of ice in the middle of the skating pond? Let's build an igloo like that, and get into it and keep warm."
"O-oo!" gasped Vi, "how can you do that?"
"Where will you get any ice?" Laddie demanded.
"Goodness! it's cold enough in here without bringing in ice," announced Rose with confidence. [10]
"We won't build the igloo of ice blocks," said Russ quite calmly. "But we'll make believe it is ice."
"I'd rather do that," Laddie agreed. "For make-believe ice can't be so wet and cold as real ice, can it?" ”

“ At dawn the next day Harluk appeared with woe in his countenance. “Good-by,” he said; “Eskimo all go to-day.”
“But why?” asked Joe in wonder; “are you not all right here with us?”
“Yesterday,” said Harluk, “plenty all right. [171] Last night Nunatak (ice spirit) people send ghost wolves for food. Eskimo put out plenty. Then they go away. To-morrow night come again. Bimeby food gone, furs gone, then they take Eskimo. More better Eskimo go away first. Too much winter ghosts at Icy Cape.” ”

“ Close to the south of us lay the Barentz Isles with their singularly formed hills, which the walrus-hunters call by the somewhat gloomy name of “The Three Coffins.” On our north an enormous iceberg rose in dazzling whiteness above a faintly glimmering field of ice, a harbinger of new countries—for its size forbade us to think that it owed its origin to the glaciers of Novaya Zemlya. ”

“ I have not put on a pair of skates for the last five years. I have seen ice enough and to spare in the shape of icebergs, and floes, and fields of ice, but that is not the sort of ice suitable for skating. A big, thundering iceberg is a wonderful thing; we nearly got run down by one, or rather we nearly ran into one, if the truth must be said, when I was in the ‘Stag,’ only, of course, we always lay the blame on anything but ourselves ”

“ The rushing stream roars below and melts snow and ice; within, hollow caverns and mighty clefts open, this is a wonderful [19] palace of ice, and in it dwells the Ice-Maiden, the Queen of the glaciers. She, the murderess, the destroyer, is half a child of air and half the powerful ruler of the streams; therefore, she had received the power, to elevate herself with the speed of the chamois to the highest pinnacle of the snow-topped mountain; where the most daring mountaineer had to hew his way, in order to take firm foot-hold. ”