Five Nights

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

THE TAKU INLET

It was just striking three as I came up the companion-stairs on to the deck of the Cottage City, into the clear topaz light of a June morning in Alaska: light that had not failed through all the night, for in this far northern latitude the sun only just dips beneath the horizon at midnight for an hour, leaving all the earth and sky still bathed in limpid yellow light, gently paling at that mystic time and glowing to its full glory again as the sun rises above the rim.

Our steamer had left the open sea and entered the Taku Inlet, and we were steaming very slowly up it, surrounded on every side by great glittering blocks of ice, flashing in the sunshine as they floated by on the buoyant blue water. How blue it was, the colouring of sea and sky! Both were so vividly blue, the note of each so deep, so intense, one seemed almost intoxicated with colour. I stepped to the vessel's side, then made my way forward and stood there; I, the lover of the East, dazzled by the beauty of the North! The marvellous picture before me was painted in but three colours, blue, gold, and white.

The sides of the inlet were jagged lines of white, the sparkling crystalline whiteness of eternal snow on sharp-pointed, almost lance-like mountain peaks; the water a broad band of blue, the sky above a canopy of blue, and there at the end of the inlet, closing it, like some colossal monster crouched awaiting us, lay the Muir, the huge glacier, a solid wedge of ice, white also, but a transparent white full of blue shadows.

Who shall describe the wonderful air and atmosphere of the North? Its brilliancy, its delicacy, its radiant diamond-like clearness? And the silence, the enchanted stillness of the North? Now as we crept slowly onwards over the vivid water between the flashing icebergs, there was no sound. Complete silence round us, on earth and sea and in the blue vault above, impressive, glittering silence. None of the passengers had broken their sleep to come up to the glory above them, and I stood alone at the forward part of the vessel gliding on through this dream of lustrous blue. Slowly we advanced towards the Muir; very slowly, for these shining bergs carried death with them if they should graze hard against the steamer's side, and, cautiously, steered with infinite pains, the little boat crept on, zigzagging between them. A frail little toy of man, it seemed, to venture here alone; small, black, impertinent atom forcing its way so hardily into this magnificence of colour, this silent splendour, this radiant stillness of the North. Into this very fastness of the most gigantic forces of Nature it had penetrated, and the sapphire sea supported it, the transparent light illumined it, the lance-like mountains looked down upon it, and the glistening bergs forbore to crush it, as if disdaining to harm so fragile a thing.

Very slowly we pushed up the inlet, approaching the shimmering blue-green wall of ice that barred the upper end; seven hundred feet down below the clear surface of the water descends this wall, while three hundred feet of it rise above, forming a glorious shining palisade across the entire width of the inlet....