[Penguin Island by Anatole France]@TWC D-Link bookPenguin Island BOOK I 19/54
In vain did Mael attempt to furl the sail.
The vessel flew distractedly towards the fabulous seas. By the light of the moon the immodest sirens of the North came around him with their hempen-coloured hair, raising their white throats and their rose-tinted limbs out of the sea; and beating the water into foam with their emerald tails, they sang in cadence: Whither go'st thou, gentle Mael, In thy trough distracted? All distended is thy sail Like the breast of Juno When from it gushed the Milky Way. For a moment their harmonious laughter followed him beneath the stars, but the vessel fled on, a hundred times more swiftly than the red ship of a Viking.
And the petrels, surprised in their flight, clung with their feet to the hair of the holy man. Soon a tempest arose full of darkness and groanings, and the trough, driven by a furious wind, flew like a sea-mew through the mist and the surge. After a night of three times twenty-four hours the darkness was suddenly rent and the holy man discovered on the horizon a shore more dazzling than diamond.
The coast rapidly grew larger, and soon by the glacial light of a torpid and sunken sun, Mael saw, rising above the waves, the silent streets of a white city, which, vaster than Thebes with its hundred gates, extended as far as the eye could see the ruins of its forum built of snow, its palaces of frost, its crystal arches, and its iridescent obelisks. The ocean was covered with floating ice-bergs around which swam men of the sea of a wild yet gentle appearance.
And Leviathan passed by hurling a column of water up to the clouds. Moreover, on a block of ice which floated at the same rate as the stone trough there was seated a white bear holding her little one in her arms, and Mael heard her murmuring in a low voice this verse of Virgil, Incipe parve puer. And full of sadness and trouble, the old man wept. The fresh water had frozen and burst the barrel that contained it.
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