Winds may be contrary. We don't know this land; and we haven't
provisions to winter."
The truth is--the maps having failed, Bering was good enough seaman to
know these uncharted signs of a continent indicated that the _St.
Peter_ was hopelessly lost. Sixteen years of nagging care, harder to
face than a line of cannon, had sucked Bering's capacity of resistance
like a vampire. That buoyancy, which lifts man above Anxious Fright,
had been sapped. The shadowy elemental powers--physical weakness,
disease, despair--were closing round the explorer like the waves of an
eternal sea.
The boat found itself in a wonder world, that beggared romance. The
great peak, which they named St. Elias, hung above a snowy row of
lesser ridges in a dome of alabaster. Icebergs, like floating palaces,
came washing down from the long line of precipitous shore. As they
neared anchorage at an island now known as Kyak, they could see billows
of ferns, grasses, lady's slippers, rhododendrons, bluebells,
forget-me-nots, rippling in the wind. Perhaps they saw those palisades
of ice, that stretch like a rampart northward along the main shore west
of St.
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