An Antarctic Mystery quotes

No doubt the following narrative will be received with entire incredulity, but I think it well that the public should be put in possession of the facts narrated in “An Antarctic Mystery.”

The public is free to believe them or not, at its good pleasure.

Only one edible plant grows there, a kind of cabbage, not found anywhere else, and very bitter of flavour. Great flocks of royal and other penguins people these islets, finding good lodging on their rocky and mossy surface.

These stupid birds, in their yellow and white feathers, with their heads thrown back and their wings like the sleeves of a monastic habit, look, at a distance, like monks in single file walking in procession along the beach.

The islands afford refuge to numbers of sea-calves, seals, and sea-elephants. The taking of those amphibious animals either on land or from the sea is profitable, and may lead to a trade which will bring a large number of vessels into these waters.

“Cannot we talk very well here?” I observed.

“Talk, Mr. Jeorling, talk standing up, and our throats dry, when it is so easy to sit down in a corner of the Green Cormorant in front of two glasses of whisky.”

“Well, then, I’ll drink for both of us. Oh! don’t imagine you are dealing with a sot! No! never more than is good for me, but always as much!”

Life on board was very regular, very simple, and its monotony was not without a certain charm.

Sailing is repose in movement, a rocking in a dream, and I did not dislike my isolation.

Of course I should have liked to find out why Captain Len Guy had changed his mind with respect to me; but how was this to be done? To question the lieutenant would have been loss of time.

“The same. His narrative was founded upon the manuscript in which the details of that extraordinary and disastrous voyage across the Antarctic Sea was related.”

I thought I must be dreaming when I heard Captain Len Guy’s words.

Edgar Poe’s romance was nothing but a fiction, a work of imagination by the most brilliant of our American writers. And here was a sane man treating that fiction as a reality.

… Len Guy gazed at it steadily, but he now needed no glass, and presently we all began to distinguish a second object which little by little detached itself from the mass, according as the melting process went on—a black shape, stretched on the white ice.

What was our surprise, mingled with horror, when we saw first an arm, then a leg, then a trunk, then a head appear, forming a human body, not in a state of nakedness, but clothed in dark garments.

For a moment I even thought that the limbs moved, that the hands were stretched towards us.

Were not these facts providential? Nay, I go farther still, and am sure that, after having done so much to guide us towards our compatriots, God will not abandon us—”

“I think as you think, captain. No, His intervention is not to be denied, and I do not believe that chance plays the part assigned to it by superficial minds upon the stage of human life. All the facts are united by a mysterious chain.”

“A chain, Mr. Jeorling, whose first link, so far as we are concerned, is Patterson’s ice-block, and whose last will be Tsalal Island. Ah! My brother! my poor brother!

“From what do you judge, boatswain?”

“From his eyes, Mr. Jeorling, from his eyes. No matter at what moment, let the ship’s head be as it may, those eyes of his are always on the south, open, unwinking, fixed like guns in position.”

Hurliguerly did not exaggerate, and I had already remarked this. To employ an expression of Edgar Poe’s, Hunt had eyes like a falcon’s.

With him, not for an instant does the needle vary from the sailing-line, however rough a lurch she may give. I am sure that if the binnacle lamp were to go out in the night Hunt would not require to relight it.

The fire in his eyes would light up the dial and keep him right.

”

“What is wrong?” I asked. “A stranding, Mr. Jeorling.”

“A shore presupposes land,” replied the boatswain ironically, “and so far as land goes there was never any except in that rascal Dirk Peters’ imagination.”

“But tell me—what has happened?”

Lying to? What could the half-breed mean by that, except that the floating mass had suddenly ceased to drift? As for the cause of this stoppage, it was neither the moment to investigate it, nor to ask ourselves what the consequences were likely to be.

“It is true, however,” cried the boatswain.

“The iceberg is not stirring, and perhaps has not stirred since it capsized!”

“Why? Is not this the case?”

“In any case it is a wonderful running aground,” replied the boatswain. “Instead of a good solid bottom, we have run aground in the air.”

“Then I am right, Hurliguerly, in saying it is an unfortunate adventure.”

Horrified! yes, indeed, we were horrified when the schooner, carried off as though by an avalanche, had disappeared in the abyss! Not a particle of our Halbrane remained, not even a wreck!

A minute ago she was one hundred feet in the air, now she was five hundred in the depths of the sea!

Yes, we were so stupefied that we were unable to think of the dangers to come—our amazement was that of people who “cannot believe their eyes.”

… determined to solve this question if possible, having mounted to the extreme top, not without risk of breaking his neck, came into such violent contact with a quebranta huesos—a sort of gigantic petrel measuring twelve feet with spread wings—that he was flung on his back.

“Curse the bird!” he said on his return to the camp, addressing the observation to me.

“I have had a narrow escape! A thump, and down I went, sprawling. I saved myself I don’t know how, for I was all but over the side. Those ice ledges, you know, slip through one’s fingers like water.

“Don’t be afraid,” cried the boatswain.

“Dirk Peters is in his element, and as much at his ease in the fog as a polar bear. He has got out of one bad scrape; he will get out of a second!”

I let Hurliguerly have his say, knowing well why the half-breed kept out of the way.