on The Great Ice Barrier, must serve until the next first-hand
examination by some future explorer.

A berg shows only about one-eighth of its total mass above water, and a
berg two hundred feet high will therefore reach approximately fourteen
hundred feet below the surface of the sea. Winds and currents have far
more influence upon them than they have upon the pack, through which
these bergs plough their way with a total disregard for such flimsy
obstacles, and cause much chaos as they go. For the rest woe betide the
ship which is so fixed into the pack that she cannot move if one of these
monsters bears down upon her.

Words cannot tell the beauty of the scenes through which we were to pass
during the next three weeks. I suppose the pack in winter must be a
terrible place enough: a place of darkness and desolation hardly to be
found elsewhere. But forms which under different conditions can only
betoken horror now conveyed to us impressions of the utmost peace and
beauty, for the sun had kissed them all.

"We have had a marvellous day. The morning watch was cloudy, but it
gradually cleared until the sky was a brilliant blue, fading on the
horizon into green and pink. The floes were pink, floating in a deep blue
sea, and all the shadows were mauve. We passed right under a monster
berg, and all day have been threading lake after lake and lead after
lead. 'There is Regent Street,' said somebody, and for some time we drove
through great streets of perpendicular walls of ice. Many a time they
were so straight that one imagined they had been cut off with a ruler
some hundreds of yards in length."[53]