"It is a mirage!" I muttered, but my voice made no sound. Slowly the
light behind the fog died out; the vapor around us turned to rose,
then dissolved, while mile on mile of a limitless sea spread away
till, like a quick line pencilled at a stroke, the horizon cut sky and
sea in half, and before us lay an ocean from which towered a mountain
of snow--or a gigantic berg of milky ice--for it was moving.

"Good Heavens," I shrieked; "it is alive!"

At the sound of my crazed cry the mountain of snow became a pillar,
towering to the clouds, and a wave of golden glory drenched the figure
to its knees! Figure? Yes--for a colossal arm shot across the sky,
then curved back in exquisite grace to a head of awful beauty--a
woman's head, with eyes like the blue lake of heaven--ay, a woman's
splendid form, upright from the sky to the earth, knee-deep in the
sea. The evening clouds drifted across her brow; her shimmering hair
lighted the world beneath with sunset. Then, shading her white brow
with one hand, she bent, and with the other hand dipped in the sea,
she sent a wave rolling at us. Straight out of the horizon it sped--a
ripple that grew to a wave, then to a furious breaker which caught us
up in a whirl of foam, bearing us onward, faster, faster, swiftly
flying through leagues of spray until consciousness ceased and all was
blank.

Yet ere my senses fled I heard again that strange cry--that sweet,
thrilling harmony rushing out over the foaming waters, filling earth
and sky with its soundless vibrations.

And I knew it was the hail of the Spirit of the North warning us back
to life again.