On the starboard, the heaving waters, black as night, were covered with pure white ice-cakes, striking and battering together with heavy grindings.

The lightnings played against the inky clouds, forked, zigzag, and dazzling to the eye.

The thunder-echoes, unmuffled by vegetation, were reverberated from bare granitic mountains and naked ice-fields with a hollow rattle that deafened and appalled us; and, in the intervals of thunder, the hoarse bark of bears, and their affrighted growlings, were borne to our ears with savage distinctness.

Mingled with these noises came the screams and cries of scores of sea-birds, wheeling and darting about.
It was half-past two, morning.
"What a fearfully grand scene!" exclaimed Wade.
And I recollect that we all laughed in his face, the words seemed so utterly inadequate to express what, by common consent, was accorded unutterable.

An hour later, the blackness of the heavens had rolled away to the westward, a fog began to rise, and morning light effaced the awful panorama of night.
By six o'clock the fog was so dense that nothing could be seen a half cable's length, and continued thus till afternoon, during which time we lay hove to under the lee of the ice.