ahead impatiently.
Warlock was running too fast, Nick knew it; he was relying on the
vigilance of his deck officers to carry her through the ice. Yet still
this speed was too slow for his seething impatience.
Above their horizon rose another shoreline, a great unbroken sweep of
towering cliff which caught the low sun, and glowed in emerald and
amethyst, a drifting tableland of solid hard ice, forty miles across and
two hundred feet high.
As they closed with that massive translucent island, so the colours that
glowed through it became more hauntingly beautiful. The cliffs were
rent by deep bays, and split by crevasses whose shadowy depths were dark
sapphire, blue and mysterious, paling out to a thousand shades of green.
My God, it's beautiful, said David Allen with the reverence of a men
kneeling in a cathedral.
The crests of the ice cliffs blazed in clearest ruby; to windward, the
big sea piled in and crashed against those cliffs, surging up them in
explosive bursts of white spray.
Yet the iceberg did not dip nor swing or work, even in that murderous
sea.
Look at the lee she is making/Dave Allen pointed. You could ride out a
force twelve behind her. On the leeward side, the waters were protected
from the wind by that mountain of sheer ice. Green and docile, they
lapped those mysterious blue cliffs, and Warlock went into the lee,
passing in a ship's length from the plunging rearing action of a wild
horse into the tranquillity of a mountain lake, calm, windless and
unnatural.
in the calm, Angel brought trays piled with crisp brown baked Cornish
pasties and steaming mugs of thick creamy cocoa, and they ate breakfast
at three in the morning, marvelling at the fine pale sunlight and the
towers of incredible beauty, the younger officers shouting and laughing
when a school of five black killer whales passed so close that they
could see their white cheek patterns and wide grinning mouths through
the icy clear waters.
The great mammals circled the ship, then ducked beneath her hull,
surging up on the far side with their huge black triangular fins
shearing the surface as they blew through the vents in the top of their
heads. The fishy stink of their breath pervaded the bridge, and then
they were gone, and Warlock motored calmly along in the lee of the ice,
like a holiday launch of day-trippers.
Nicholas Berg did not join the spontaneous gaiety. He munched one of
Angel's delicious pies full of meat and thick gravy, but he could not
finish it. His stomach was too tense. He found himself resenting the
high spirits of his officers. The laughter offended him, now when his
whole life hung in precarious balance. He felt the temptation to quell
them with a few harsh words, conscious of the power he had to plunge
them into instant consternation.
Nick listened to their carefree banter and felt old enough to be their
father, despite the few years difference in their ages. He was
impatient with them, irritated that they should be able to laugh like
