He looked up at it again: a huge standard mesa-type iceberg, flat-topped, steep-sided, doubtlessly spawned by some glacier on the north coast of Greenland. He had some experience of icebergs, enough to know that the ice beneath the water would be plunging to untold depths into the ocean, in strengths and thicknesses which would reduce even the power of the killer whales to less than nothing . . . He walked back towards the huddled group.
Ross was sitting up when he reached them, regaining his breath. Kate glanced up at Quick, wondering briefly at the change in his face, from the thunderous frown he had been wearing moments earlier. He was smiling now, and his eyes were sparkling even behind the slit-eyed mask.
“Colin,” he said, “I think I can save us . . .” He beamed round them all. “If you’ll just look out to sea, you will see the answer to all our problems.” He gestured towards the iceberg as though he had personally arranged it.
They all looked up. It was still several miles away, but it towered like a glass mountain, floating nearer as they watched. “I’d like to see those damn whales getting up through that!” he said.
Ross nodded: Simon was right. If they could get on to that, they would be safe from the sea and clearly visible to rescuers. “All right, Simon. That’s a great idea . . .”
But even as he spoke, there came a sound like a muffled explosion, followed by a rumble which made their teeth rattle in their heads and a towering cliff on the approaching berg slowly crumbled and hurled thousands of tons of ice and snow into the foaming water. The berg rocked from side to side with the shock, becoming almost completely lost in a fog of disturbed ice crystals and spray. They sat, bemused by the scale of the thing, while the waves spread towards them as though a gigantic stone had been hurled into the ocean. The floe was too big to ride over them like a boat, and so they broke, several feet high, against the ice, sending a shallow wash of freezing foam over the surface towards them.
The echoes of the rumble died like distant thunder. The foam halted, receded. Quick, not knowing what to say, was silent. Ross got to his feet with a great deal of agility. “Right. We’d better get back to the camp. We have to think this thing out.”
“What is there to think about?” demanded Quick, trying not to sound aggrieved.
“We’ll find that out,” said Ross. He turned to Job. “Where’s the Weatherby?”
“In the supply tent. Why?”
Ross shook his head, and led the way back to the camp. Quick remained where he was while the others followed Ross. He looked bitterly towards the berg. That bloody great lump of ice had somehow let him down, had let Ross take the initiative. It never occurred to him that Ross had taken the initiative because he knew what he was talking about. Still – ever hopeful – the idea was good: even if the berg did lose a cliff or two, it was still safer than the floe. He turned and hurried to the camp, still hoping to take the lead again.
They were all standing at the edge of the ice nearest the camp, gathered around Ross, who was examining the iceberg through the Weatherby’s telescopic sight.
“Well,” demanded Quick, “what do you see?”
Ross moved the sight methodically up and down the towering cliffs, narrowing his eye against the golden blaze from the reflecting slopes, methodically probing the green crystal shadows where it seemed as though the berg’s very soul was visible. It was almost like looking at a huge wave held at the moment of breaking, composed for ever of white, suncolours, lucent water-shades. But it was not the beauty of the thing which claimed Ross’s attention. The gun moved carefully. Slowly. The urgency of his quiet scrutiny communicated itself to the others so that even Quick stood silent, and waited. Then the gun stopped moving, and Ross’s breath hissed. At a slight angle to them, a heavy buttress pushed out of the sheer wall, creating a broad shadow. The Weatherby’s sight brought this deep green cliff terrifyingly close, and plainly revealed its depths. Ross looked in the deeps of the iceberg, and saw there the tell-tale mottlings which warned of different thicknesses of ice behind the cliff, of huge caves deep in its structure. And through this cliff moved bright veins, gathering to opaqueness at one point after another, then spreading like the webs of giant spiders. The whole cliff was covered in cracks, as though someone had attacked it with a giant sledgehammer.
“It’s a Ghost,” said Ross, looking at Job.
“God be merciful,” whispered Job.
“What do you mean, a Ghost?” asked Quick possessively. “For God’s sake . . .”
“Come back to the camp, Simon; I’ll tell you.”
“No damn it, explain here . . .”
But Ross had already turned towards the camp and walked off. Quick looked at the iceberg, frowning, not understanding. A Ghost Berg: he had heard the phrase . . . He also turned, and followed.
“You all know how icebergs are formed, how they break free from the ends of glaciers that debouch into the sea, and float away like giant ice-cubes.” They all nodded. Quick sat down, prepared to disbelieve every word.
“Many of these bergs float south into the North Atlantic; some get into the North Pacific. In the big oceans, they tend to move farther south until they hit warm current, and then they melt.” Ross looked round. His audience’s attention was not riveted to him: they knew all this. But they were still listening, so he proceeded.
“Icebergs that remain in the Arctic Ocean can act slightly differently. They often melt much more slowly, for a start. And they come in for severe weathering. The effect of this weathering every now and then is to produce what is called a Ghost Berg. A Ghost Berg is a berg that has been floating around up here for so long that the wind and rain have worked down cracks in the ice, widening them, hollowing them out, making fissures and caves. And if it becomes hollow, it becomes highly unstable. You saw that cliff fall. If that is a Ghost Berg, the whole mass of the upper terraces could go in the same way.”
“What sets them off?” asked Kate.
“Almost anything; but most often, noise.”
“Noise?”
“Yes. When the ice begins to hollow out, it goes into great caves; now these caves, like most caves, can act like echo chambers so that any noise becomes multiplied to such an extent that its vibrations can cause the walls of the caves to fracture or shatter. And if that happens, the whole lot comes down. Maybe fifty thousand tons of it.”
They looked at the berg now with trepidation.
“You said ‘if that is a Ghost Berg’. Don’t you know for certain?” asked Quick.
“I know the whole wall facing us is fractured, and in a dangerously unstable state; and that the terracing behind it is full of caves,” said Ross equably. “I notice that it is rapidly overhauling us, blown, I assume, by the wind which you will have noticed has shifted back to the east. This to my mind hints that the upper terraces, although broad and massive enough to catch this wind, and act as an effective sail, are not heavy enough to impede the movement of the berg as a whole.”
“But what if you’re wrong? What if it is just the nearest cliff that’s dangerous? Can we afford to throw away the potential safety of moving on to the berg? I mean, if we stay here, we could all go the way of poor old Preston.” He spoke of it as though it was some distant event whose importance had been sapped by the passing of a long period of time.
“I suppose we could try to bring the risky terracing down and see what happens,” said Ross. “But if we’re going to try it, we’d better do it before it gets too near, because if anything goes wrong, if the cliffs all go, and the upper terracing comes down, the berg will upend. The whole thing will turn over.”
They went over to the point at which Ross had examined the iceberg with the telescopic sight on the Weatherby, which he still carried in his right hand. As they watched him, he went down on one knee, and took up the position he had assumed to shoot at the dynamite. The rifle gave its whiplash crack once, twice, three times.