Out of whose womb came the ice?
And the hoary frost of Heaven, who
hath gendered it?
The waters are hid as if with a stone
And the face of the deep is frozen. Job 38: 8-9
The Icebergs, 1861 Frederic Edwin Church
Over the ice the moonlight flows, and
is thrown back gleaming . . . A strange
Nirvana-like beauty, as if from
another, extinct planet made of shining
white marble . . . and everything so silent,
so frighteningly silent, like the great
silence that will arrive one day, when
the world will once more be desolate
and empty.
Fridtjof Nansen, Diaries of the
Fram, 1895
