Dancing Down The Mountain To Camp, My Mind Glowing Like The Sunbeaten
Glaciers, I Found The Indians Seated Around A Good Fire, Entirely
Happy Now That The Farthest Point Of The Journey Was Safely Reached
And The Long, Dark Storm Was Cleared Away.
How hopefully, peacefully
bright that night were the stars in the frosty sky, and how
impressive was the thunder of the icebergs, rolling, swelling,
reverberating through the solemn stillness!
I was too happy to sleep.
About daylight next morning we crossed the fiord and landed on the
south side of the rock that divides the wall of the great glacier.
The whiskered faces of seals dotted the open spaces between the
bergs, and I could not prevent John and Charley and Kadachan from
shooting at them. Fortunately, few, if any, were hurt. Leaving the
Indians in charge of the canoe, I managed to climb to the top of the
wall by a good deal of step-cutting between the ice and dividing
rock, and gained a good general view of the glacier. At one favorable
place I descended about fifty feet below the side of the glacier,
where its denuding, fashioning action was clearly shown. Pushing back
from here, I found the surface crevassed and sunken in steps, like
the Hugh Miller Glacier, as if it were being undermined by the action
of tide-waters. For a distance of fifteen or twenty miles the
river-like ice-flood is nearly level, and when it recedes, the ocean
water will follow it, and thus form a long extension of the fiord,
with features essentially the same as those now extending into the
continent farther south, where many great glaciers once poured into
the sea, though scarce a vestige of them now exists.
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