Then, too, when the ship was butting the ice, the shock of the impact would have made Morpheus himself sit up and rub his eyes every few minutes.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN BARTLETT IN THE CROW'S NEST] Owing to the stupendous and resistless character of the heavier ice, a ship would be utterly helpless if she were ever caught fairly and squarely between two giant floes.

In such a case there would be no escape for any structure which man could design or build.

More than once a brief nip between two big blue floes has set the whole one hundred and eighty-four-foot length of the _Roosevelt_ vibrating like a violin string.

At other times, under the pressure on the cylinders of the by-pass before described, the vessel would rear herself upon the ice like a steeplechaser taking a fence.

It was a glorious battle--this charging of the ship against man's coldest enemy and possibly his oldest, for there is no calculating the age of this glacial ice.
Sometimes, as the steel-shod stem of the _Roosevelt_ split a floe squarely in two, the riven ice would emit a savage snarl that seemed to have behind it all the rage of the invaded immemorial Arctic struggling with the self-willed intruder, man.