Spider Legs Read Free Page A

but this time it was right, and they were going against the current to see the icebergs. They were in no hurry.
    “Are you warm yet, Galatea?” he inquired.
    “Alive, but not warm,” she replied. “Maybe if you heat me from the inside . . .”
    There was silence while he did his best. In due course she confessed to having been warmed throughout.
    An hour after making love, Garth and Kalinda emerged from the cabin to look at the coast with its charming village ports and then back at the large floating chunks of ice. “Do you think it's such a good idea to get so close to the glacier?” Kalinda asked as she turned her head. The light caught her silky hair turning it into the color of a Hawaiian sunset.
    “Nothing to worry about. We'll go slow,” Garth said as he tiptoed his fingers from her calf to her knee. There was usually littledanger when sailing in these seas due to the number of Coast Guard boats in the area. Ever since the steamship Titanic collided with an iceberg and sunk, ship lanes near Newfoundland had continued to be patrolled by one or two American Coast Guard boats during the seasons when icebergs were drifting. Several nations helped to defray the cost of this patrol service.
    “There must be hundreds of icebergs!” Kalinda said. Some looked like gigantic pyramids, hummocked in places to form the frigid likenesses of yawning lions. Garth turned to Kalinda.
    “The location of every iceberg in these waters is radioed to the ships in the neighborhood. We can't get lost even if we wanted to.”
    “Let's be careful,” Kalinda said. “I'd hate to collide with an iceberg.”
    “You're always such a worrier,” he said, smiling.
    “If I didn't worry, I think you'd have killed yourself by now,” she said, perhaps thinking of the time he had nearly crashed the schooner into a coral reef a year ago.
    Garth nodded as he edged the two-masted, motor-powered schooner even closer to an iceberg. Even though he realized that eight times as much of the ice was under the water than above, it was hard to fully appreciate that the beautiful blue waves concealed a mass of ice much larger than the behemoth before their eyes. Flashes of sunlight began to reflect off the berg's crystalline surfaces, producing an astonishing collection of scintillating orange and blue colors.
    “Magnificent,” Kalinda said as she pointed to the icefields, which glimmered like mercury. “The colors remind me a little of the sparkling crystals on the chandelier in my mother's home.”
    “Look at that one,” Garth pointed. “Those kinds of glacial ice are known as ‘dry docks’ because of their deep U-shaped indentations. See the sparkling ponds of water at the bottom of the U?”
    “Wouldn't want to get trapped at the bottom. How much do you think it weighs?”
    “Probably around two million tons.”

    Suddenly the iceberg broke into several huge pieces, as if someone had exploded dynamite in its icy interior. It made a noise like thunder, which could be heard for several miles.
    “Grab onto something,” Garth cried. Kalinda ran toward the mast as rings of large waves began to radiate from the berg in all directions. The schooner began to pitch and roll as if it were in a great storm.
    “Ahh,” Kalinda cried as cold particles of salt spray splashed and ran down her legs. Part of the berg began to die with a crackling and crumbling. There were such roars of agony that it sounded as if the Phantom were under siege by cannons. When the waves subsided Garth decided he better be the first to speak.
    “Everything OK?”
    “I thought you said this was safe,” she said sarcastically.
    “Sorry. The bergs sometimes do that. Didn't realize how powerful the effect could be.” After hours of direct sunlight had melted the surface ice, internal strains in the frozen water were manifest in what Newfoundland fisherman called iceberg “foundering"—the bergs exploded into huge chunks of ice. With a horrifying roar, blocks of ice bigger