Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. MELBOURNE TO CAPE YORK. There was joy among us on arriving at Melbourne. Of gales, snow, icebergs, and discomfort generally, we had had enough, and the memory of a dinner I ate at the club the first evening, followed by the opera, yet lingers in my memory as one of the pleasantest experiences of a poorly paid and laborious career ! And yet that Southern cruise was well worth the discomfort; the islands were delightful, the weather was, on the whole, very fine, while there are few people now alive who have seen such superb Antarctic iceberg scenery as we have. One afternoon particularly is in my mind's eye at this moment. "VVe are steaming towards the supposed position of land, only some thirty miles distant, over a glass-like sea, unruffled by breath of wind; past great masses of ice, grouped so close together in some cases as to form au inbroken wall of cliff several miles in length. Then, as we pass within a few hundred yards, the chain breaks up into two or three separate bergs, and one sees—and beautifully from the masthead—the blue sea and distant horizon between perpendicular walls of glistening alabaster white, against which the long swell dashes, rearing up in great blue- green heaps, falling back in a torrent of rainbow-flashing spray, or goes roaring into the azure caverns, followed immediately by a thundering thud, as the compressed air within buffets it back again in a torrent of seething white foam. We are all on deck, looking out for the American's land, about which we are now. getting extremely sceptical. At six o'clock the pack-ice is sighted ahead, stretching away to right and left, and to the South Pole, too, as far as we can see or know. Abaft us the sun—nearhis setting—is glowing out from among light golden clouds, the only ones in an almost cl...