THE ALPINE BERG.—STUDIES OF ITS SOUTHERN FRONT.—FRIGHTFUL
EXPLOSION AND FALL OF ICE.—STUDIES OF THE WESTERN SIDE.—OUR
PLAY WITH THE MOOSE HORNS.—THE SPLENDOR OF THE BERG IN THE
SUNSET.
WE are now lying under oars, riding quietly on the swells, distant, say,
a hundred yards south of the berg, which has a visible, perpendicular
front of five hundred, by one hundred and fifty feet or more elevation.
It resembles a precipice of newly-broken porcelain, wet and dripping,
its vast face of dead white tinged with green, here and there, from the
reflection of the green water at its base. We are in its shadow, which
reaches off on the sunny sea, a long, dark track. The outline of the
berg is one edge of dazzling brightness, a kind of irregular, flowing
frame, gilt with sunlight, which comes pouring over in full tide from
behind. Where the ice shoots up into thin spear-points, or runs along a
semi-transparent blade, the light shines through, and gives the tint of
flame, with a greenish band below, and lower still, a soft blue,
presently lost in the broad white. In these ices, never think of any
such as you see at home, from Rockland and Catskill. Frozen under
enormous pressure, and frozen to dry and flinty hardness, it has all the
sparkle of minutest crystallization, and resembles, as I have said
already, freshly broken statue-marble or porcelain, as you see it on the
edge newly snapped. The surface of this ice is in itself a study
singularly complex and subtle. How the mere passer-by, at a distance, is
going to know any thing of value to a painter, I cannot tell. The fact
is, he knows just nothing at all. A portrait-painter might as well
pretend to have a knowledge of flesh, from seeing people at a distance.
I think if I could study just here, for hours, I should be able to speak
more correctly. Of course, the Painter, whose eye is trained to look
into the texture of surfaces, sees all more readily. I am looking up to
rough crags, and enormous bulges, where the recent fracture would seem
to have an almost painful sharpness to the touch. Where the surfaces
have been for a time exposed to the weather, they have the flesh-finish
of a statue. Along the lower portion, where you see the glassing effects
of the waves, there it resembles the rarest Sèvres vase, or even pearl
itself, so exquisitely fine is the polish. It is almost mirror-like. You
perceive the dim images of passing objects, shadowy ships and shores.
Where the light pours over it in its strength, it shines like burnished
steel in the sunshine.
Under the manifold effects of atmosphere, light and shade, none can
imagine, through the medium of mere description, the grandeur and glory
of these moving Alps of ice. Here now, is one simple feature, which our
dangerous proximity alone enables us to view, the wondrous beauty of
which—beauty to the feelings as well as to the eye—I cannot find any
language to paint. I may talk of it through a hundred periods, and yet
you will never feel and see a tithe of what you would in a moment, were
you here upon the spot. The berg, in the deep shadow of which we now sit
painting and writing, as I have intimated, is in form a mountain
pinnacle, split down from the summit square, and the split side toward
our boat. What has became of the lost half, the Great Builder of
icebergs only knows. We are under the cliffs, from which that unknown
part burst off and fell away. It is an awful precipice, with all the
features of precipices, such as are seen about capes, headlands and
ocean shores. Here it swells out, there it sinks in, masses have slidden
out, and left square-headed doorways opening into the solid porcelain,
ridges run off, and hollows run in and around. In these very hollows and
depressions is the one feature of which I am speaking. And, after all,
what is it? It is simply shadow. Is that all? That is all: only shadow.
All the grand façade is one shadow, with a rim of splendor like liquid
gold leaf or yellow flame, but in those depressions is a _deeper_
shadow. Shadow under shadow, dove-colored and blue. Thus there seems to
be drifting about, in the hollow lurking-places of the dead white, a
colored atmosphere, the warmth, softness, and delicate beauty of which
no mind can think of words to express. So subtle is it and evanescent,
that recollection cannot recall it when once gone, but by the help of
the heart and the feelings, where the spirit of beauty last dies away.
You can feel it, after you have forgotten what its complexion precisely
is, and from that emotion you may come to remember it. You would
remember nothing more beautiful.
[Illustration: PLATE N^o. 4.
ICE FALLING FROM A LOFTY BERG
Lith. of Sarony Major & Knapp, 449 Broadway NY.]
Any doubt that I may have entertained about the danger of lying under
the shadow of this great ice-rock is now wholly dispelled. We have just
witnessed what was, for the moment, a perfect cataract of ice, with all
its motion, and many times its noise. Quick as lightning and loud as
thunder, when bolt and thunder come at the same instant, there was one
terrific crack, a sharp and silvery ringing blow upon the atmosphere,
which I shall never forget, nor ever be able to describe. It shook me
through, and struck the very heart. The only response on my part, and I
was not alone in the fright, was a convulsive spring to the feet, and a
shout to the oarsmen, of fierce command, “Row back! row back!” The
spectacle was nearly as startling as the explosion. At once, the upper
face of the berg burst out upon the air, as if it had been blasted, and
swept down across the great cliff, a huge cataract of green and snowy
fragments, with a wild, crashing roar, followed by the heavy, sullen
thunder of the plunge into the ocean, and the rolling away of the
high-crested seas, and the rocking of the mighty mass back and forth, in
the effort to regain its equilibrium. I dreaded the encounter; but our
whale-boat was quite at home, and breasted the lofty swells most
gracefully. But how fearfully impressive is all this! I recall the
warning of the Bishop of Newfoundland, and recollect the conversation of
the Rev. Mr. Wood, the rector of St. Thomas’.
We now pass round to the other side of the berg, and take a position
between it and the sun. Upon our first circumnavigation, we found this
edge of the ice, in its lowest part, about six feet above the sea, with
a cavernous hollow running all round, into which the waves were playing
with their strange and many sounds. Now, from the recent loss of ice on
the opposite heights, all this edge has sunk below the waves, leaving
only an inclined plane sweeping up from the water’s edge to the steeper
parts of the berg, at an angle of about 20 degrees. Fancy a slab of
Italian marble, four and five hundred feet in width, extending from the
eaves of the City Hall, New York, half-way or more down the park. I
think you will have a tolerable notion of the slope now before us. Up
this slippery field of ivory hardness roll the waves, dark as night
until they strike the ice, when, in a flash, they turn into that lovely
green of the sea, and afterward break in long lines of tumultuous foam.
The spectacle is perfectly magnificent. A seam of ice, apparently six
inches in diameter, of the hue of a sapphire, cuts the berg from its
very top down, and doubtless cuts through the entire submarine body.
This jewel of the iceberg is a wonderful beauty. Sparkles of light seem
to come from its blue, transparent depths. What, at first, appears
singular is, that these blue veins are much softer than the surrounding
ice, melting faster, and so becoming channels in which little torrents
glitter as they run. At first, we were at a loss to know how they
originated, but presently felt satisfied, that they were cracks filled
with water, and frozen when the berg was a glacier. This indelible mark
of primitive breakage and repair indicates with some correctness the
original perpendicular of the ice. According to the blue band in the
berg now before us, it is occupying very nearly the position it was in
when it was a fissure or crevasse of the glacier. Long processional
lines of broken ice are continually floating off from the parent berg,
which, in the process of melting, assume many curious shapes, huge
antlers of the moose and elk, and sea-fowl, geese and ducks, of gigantic
figure. We have just succeeded in securing one of these antlers, and a
merry time we had. Before reaching it, we supposed one could bend over
and lift it out of the water as easily as he stoops and picks up a
buck’s horn out of the prairie grass. It was a match for three of us,
and escaped out of our hands and arms repeatedly, slipping back into the
waves, and requiring us to round to again and again before we fairly had
it. As it is the hardest and the heaviest, so it is the most slippery of
all ices, and certainly it seems to me the coldest thing upon which
human hands were ever laid. Our summer cakes, handed in by the ice-man,
are warm, I fancy, in comparison. I do not wonder that the face of
icebergs burst off, under the expansion of the heat they receive in
these July days. The surface of this horn is not the least curious
feature of it: it is melted into circular depressions about the depth
and size of a large watch-crystal, all cutting into each other with such
regularity that their angles fall into lines parallel and diagonal in
the most artistic manner. Now that we have it in the boat, it resembles
a pair of mammoth moose-horns sculptured from water-soaked alabaster. We
see several of them now, five or six feet tall, rocking and nodding on
the swells as if they were the living appendages of some old moose of
the briny deep, come up to sport a little in the world of warmth and
sunshine.
C—— finds great difficulty in painting, from the motion of the boat;
but it is the best thing in the service, after all, for the men can take
a position, and keep it by the help of oars, in spite of the waves and
currents which beset an iceberg. The moments for which we have been
waiting are now passing, and the berg is immersed in almost supernatural
splendors. The white alpine peak rises out of a field of delicate
purple, fading out on one edge into pale sky-blue. Every instant changes
the quality of the colors. They flit from tint to tint, and dissolve
into other hues perpetually, and with a rapidity impossible to describe
or paint. I am tempted to look over my shoulder into the north, and see
if the “merry dancers” are not coming, so marvellously do the colors
come and go. The blue and the purple pass up into peach-blow and pink.
Now it blushes in the last look of the sun-red blushes of beauty—tints
of the roseate birds of the south—the complexion of the roses of
Damascus. In this delicious dye it stands embalmed—only for a minute,
though; for now the softest dove-colors steal into the changing glory,
and turn it all into light and shade on the whitest satin. The bright
green waves are toiling to wash it whiter, as they roll up from the
violet sea, and explode in foam along the broad alabaster. Power and
Beauty, hand in hand, bathing the bosom of Purity. I need not pause to
explain how all this is; but so it is, and many times more, in the
passing away of the sunshine and the daylight. It is wonderful! I had
never dreamed of it, even while I have been reading of icebergs well
described. As I sit and look at this broken work of the Divine
fingers,—only a shred broken from the edge of a glacier, vast as it
is—I whisper these words of Revelation: “and hath washed their robes,
and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” It hangs before us, with
the sea and the sky behind it, like some great robe made in heaven.
Where the flowing folds break into marble-like cliffs, on the extreme
wings of the berg, an inward green seems to be pricking through a fine
straw tint, spangled with gold. Weary, chilly, and a little sea-sick, I
am glad to find the Painter giving the last touches to a sketch, and to
hear him give the word for return. The men, who in common with all these
people of this northern sea have a terror of icebergs, gladly lift the
sails, and so, with Captain Knight at the helm, we are speeding over the
waves for Battle Harbor.