The Ship Stops Moving
White water turns to glass, and the sea holds the ship fast.
For six weeks the Aurora pushed south, breaking through thin sheets of floating ice.
The sea grew paler each day, until it seemed less like water than like broken glass.
Then, one grey morning, the ship was surrounded by ice on every side.
At first the men were not worried, for such things were expected in these waters.
The captain ordered the engines full, hoping the Aurora could still force a path ahead.
But the ice was packed so tightly that the ship could barely move an inch.
Within a day the was held fast, gripped by a sea that had turned solid.
Weller climbed to the crow's nest and stared at the white desert stretching to the horizon.
Nowhere could he see open water, only endless plains of ice pressed hard together.
The ship was trapped, and every hour the frozen sea closed a little tighter around it.
The engines were shut down, since burning coal against solid ice was a foolish waste.
"We are prisoners of the ice now," Weller told his officers in a calm, low voice.
The men listened quietly, understanding at last that their plans had frozen along with the sea.
They were so far from land that no could reach them before the spring.
The Aurora had become a still, wooden island in a world of shifting white.
Day after day, the ice carried the trapped ship slowly wherever the hidden currents pleased.
The crew could do nothing but wait, and waiting was harder than any storm.
Weller knew that men were soon unhappy men, and unhappy men soon quarrelled.
So he filled their hours with work, games, and lessons to keep their spirits alive.
The scientists measured the ice, while the sailors exercised the dogs across the frozen fields.
At night the cold was so fierce that breath froze into crystals on their beards.
The ship groaned around them as the ice squeezed her sides with terrible patience.
Weller wrote in his journal that the Aurora was no longer sailing, but drifting.
He did not yet tell the men how dangerous that slow, helpless might become.
For now, the ship held firm, and her warm cabins felt almost safe.
But deep in the ice, a was building that no wooden could resist forever.