The Camp Was Made On A Rocky Bench Near The Front Of The
Pacific Glacier, And The Canoe Was Carried Beyond The Reach Of The
Bergs And Berg-Waves.
The bergs were now crowded in a dense pack
against the discharging front, as if the storm-wind had determined to
make the glacier take back her crystal offspring and keep them at
home.
While camp affairs were being attended to, I set out to climb a
mountain for comprehensive views; and before I had reached a height
of a thousand feet the rain ceased, and the clouds began to rise from
the lower altitudes, slowly lifting their white skirts, and lingering
in majestic, wing-shaped masses about the mountains that rise out of
the broad, icy sea, the highest of all the white mountains, and the
greatest of all the glaciers I had yet seen. Climbing higher for a
still broader outlook, I made notes and sketched, improving the
precious time while sunshine streamed through the luminous fringes of
the clouds and fell on the green waters of the fiord, the glittering
bergs, the crystal bluffs of the vast glacier, the intensely white,
far-spreading fields of ice, and the ineffably chaste and spiritual
heights of the Fairweather Range, which were now hidden, now partly
revealed, the whole making a picture of icy wildness unspeakably pure
and sublime.
Looking southward, a broad ice-sheet was seen extending in a gently
undulating plain from the Pacific Fiord in the foreground to the
horizon, dotted and ridged here and there with mountains which were
as white as the snow-covered ice in which they were half, or more
than half, submerged.
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