Poets have, in all ages, called this the caprice of the waves.  But there is no such thing as caprice.  The disconcerting enigmas which in nature we call caprice, and in human life chance, are splinters of a law revealed to us in glimpses.

CHAPTER VIII.

NIX ET NOX.

The characteristic of the snowstorm is its blackness.  Nature’s habitual aspect during a storm, the earth or sea black and the sky pale, is reversed; the sky is black, the ocean white, foam below, darkness above; a horizon walled in with smoke; a zenith roofed with crape.  The tempest resembles a cathedral hung with mourning, but no light in that cathedral:  no phantom lights on the crests of the waves, no spark, no phosphorescence, naught but a huge shadow.  The polar cyclone differs from the tropical cyclone, inasmuch as the one sets fire to every light, and the other extinguishes them all.  The world is suddenly converted into the arched vault of a cave.  Out of the night falls a dust of pale spots, which hesitate between sky and sea.  These spots, which are flakes of snow, slip, wander, and flow.  It is like the tears of a winding-sheet putting themselves into lifelike motion.  A mad wind mingles with this dissemination.  Blackness crumbling into whiteness, the furious into the obscure, all the tumult of which the sepulchre is capable, a whirlwind under a catafalque—­such is the snowstorm.  Underneath trembles the ocean, forming and re-forming over portentous unknown depths.

In the polar wind, which is electrical, the flakes turn suddenly into hailstones, and the air becomes filled with projectiles; the water crackles, shot with grape.

No thunderstrokes:  the lightning of boreal storms is silent.  What is sometimes said of the cat, “it swears,” may be applied to this lightning.  It is a menace proceeding from a mouth half open and strangely inexorable.  The snowstorm is a storm blind and dumb; when it has passed, the ships also are often blind and the sailors dumb.

To escape from such an abyss is difficult.

It would be wrong, however, to believe shipwreck to be absolutely inevitable.  The Danish fishermen of Disco and the Balesin; the seekers of black whales; Hearn steering towards Behring Strait, to discover the mouth of Coppermine River; Hudson, Mackenzie, Vancouver, Ross, Dumont D’Urville, all underwent at the Pole itself the wildest hurricanes, and escaped out of them.

It was into this description of tempest that the hooker had entered, triumphant and in full sail—­frenzy against frenzy.  When Montgomery, escaping from Rouen, threw his galley, with all the force of its oars, against the chain barring the Seine at La Bouille, he showed similar effrontery.

The Matutina sailed on fast; she bent so much under her sails that at moments she made a fearful angle with the sea of fifteen degrees; but her good bellied keel adhered to the water as if glued to it.  The keel resisted the grasp of the hurricane.  The lantern at the prow cast its light ahead.