The Frozen Pirate by W. Clark Russell

I found myself on the summit of a kind of table-land; vast bodies of ice, every block weighing hundreds and perhaps thousands of tons lay scattered over it; yet for the space of a mile or so the character was that of flatness. Southwards the range went upwards to a coastal front of some hundred feet, with a huddle of peaks and strange configurations behind soaring to an elevation from the sea-line of two or three hundred feet. Northwards the range sloped gradually, with such a shelving of its hinder part that I could catch a glimpse of a little space of the blue sea that way. From this I perceived that whatever thickness and surface of ice lay southwards, in the north it was attenuated to the shape of a wedge, so that its extreme breadth where it projected its cape or extremity would not exceed a musket shot.

A companion might have qualified in my mind something of the sense of prodigious loneliness and desolation inspired by that huge picture of dazzling uneven whiteness, blotting out the whole of the south-east ocean, rolling in hills of blinding brilliance into the blue heavens, and curving and dying out into an airy film of silvery-azure radiance leagues away down in the south-west. But to my solitary eye the spectacle was an amazing and confounding one.