The voyage began successfully. A run of good luck seemed to sustain us as soon as we pulled out of the harbour. There were fair winds, few storms, and the beautiful sun shone down on us as we sailed down the coast of the continent.
Our luck held for the entire crossing, even on the approach to the giant ice sheets, bergs towered above the mast like white skyscrapers. Even as we climbed down rope ladders into the light, manoeuvrable skiffs, everything seemed to be going our way.
A pod of dolphins, a hundred strong, gambolled and played ahead of us, leaping out of the dark water like our very own landing party. Little did we know they led us to our doom. We cautiously approached the ice face, two men per skiff.
Swinson, standing alongside me, raised a crossbow and fired a bolt high into the air trailing a long, strong rope, followed by a dozen more bolts from the skiffs around us. Their iron heads stuck fast in the ice a hundred feet up the wall and, one by one, we began to climb.
One man, Swinson, was left to coral and tow the boats back to the Valantis. He stood alone in the skiff on the black sheet of water. High on the ice face, we found a shelf of sorts, three or four feet wide and thirty feet long. We waited there, panting with our hands on our knees from the effort.
The air was cold and our breath fogged out in great clouds as if we were smoking cigars around the tables at the Vagabond Club back in London. I'd just collected my thoughts and was reloading a crossbow when I happened to glance down at the line of skiffs bobbing along on the black sea.
And then something so astonishing happened that I could hardly believe my eyes. As Swinson bent forward in the skiff, preparing to pull once more upon the oars, the sea around him, which had once been so calm, all of a sudden began boiling and bubbling as though the very fires of hell licked underneath. Whitecaps pinched a few feet in the air, creating deep troughs in between.
It looked like someone was shaking a bowl full of water. Swinson was being tossed around like a toy sailor in a boat. No other skiff was endangered, however, as the roiling mass seemed to concentrate solely underneath the unfortunate man and his boat.
Then, if you can believe it, something appeared in the water. A blue hand seemed to appear in the waves. The hand was so large that the skiff fit easily upon its palm. The fingers were thirty feet long, and they curled in slightly making a cage, and, as we gasped in amazement and horror, a wrist and forearm seemed to grow out of the sea like a monstrous blue tree sprouting from the earth.
We could see poor Swinson frantically waving his arms and calling for us to help him. But what could we do? One of the lads fired off a bolt but it sailed clean through the wrist with no discernible effect. The forearm continued to grow and rise. The gigantic hand towered above us, eclipsing the sun. We were cast into shadow and I looked down and saw a shoulder, neck, jaw and ear appear from the surface of the sea.
'Sir,' cried one of my luckless mates, and I, following his horror-struck gaze, looked skywards to watch the great hand clench into a fist, squeezing so the dark blue knuckles turned white and thick veins popped out on the back of the hand.
I thought I heard a yelp like a dog caught in a trap, then a crunch of timbers, and then, with a huge sploonch that sent the tidal wave rushing towards us, the mighty first came down with a smack.
I had a second's glimpse of a huge dripping monster climbing out of the ocean before the wave hit me. It smashed the air from my lungs, the thoughts from my mind as tons and tons of icy water dragged me off that perilous edge.
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