This Was My First General View Of Glacier Bay, A Solitude Of Ice
And Snow And Newborn Rocks, Dim, Dreary, Mysterious.
I held the
ground I had so dearly won for an hour or two, sheltering myself from
the blast as best I could, while with benumbed fingers I sketched
what I could see of the landscape, and wrote a few lines in my
notebook.
Then, breasting the snow again, crossing the shifting
avalanche slopes and torrents, I reached camp about dark, wet and
weary and glad.
While I was getting some coffee and hardtack, Mr. Young told me that
the Indians were discouraged, and had been talking about turning
back, fearing that I would be lost, the canoe broken, or in some
other mysterious way the expedition would come to grief if I
persisted in going farther. They had been asking him what possible
motive I could have in climbing mountains when storms were blowing;
and when he replied that I was only seeking knowledge, Toyatte said,
"Muir must be a witch to seek knowledge in such a place as this and
in such miserable weather."
After supper, crouching about a dull fire of fossil wood, they became
still more doleful, and talked in tones that accorded well with the
wind and waters and growling torrents about us, telling sad old
stories of crushed canoes, drowned Indians, and hunters frozen in
snowstorms. Even brave old Toyatte, dreading the treeless, forlorn
appearance of the region, said that his heart was not strong, and
that he feared his canoe, on the safety of which our lives depended,
might be entering a skookum-house (jail) of ice, from which there
might be no escape; while the Hoona guide said bluntly that if I was
so fond of danger, and meant to go close up to the noses of the
ice-mountains, he would not consent to go any farther; for we should
all be lost, as many of his tribe had been, by the sudden rising of
bergs from the bottom. They seemed to be losing heart with every howl
of the wind, and, fearing that they might fail me now that I was in
the midst of so grand a congregation of glaciers, I made haste to
reassure them, telling them that for ten years I had wandered alone
among mountains and storms, and good luck always followed me; that
with me, therefore, they need fear nothing. The storm would soon
cease and the sun would shine to show us the way we should go, for
God cares for us and guides us as long as we are trustful and brave,
therefore all childish fear must be put away. This little speech did
good. Kadachan, with some show of enthusiasm, said he liked to
travel with good-luck people; and dignified old Toyatte declared that
now his heart was strong again, and he would venture on with me as
far as I liked for my "wawa" was "delait" (my talk was very good).
The old warrior even became a little sentimental, and said that even
if the canoe was broken he would not greatly care, because on the way
to the other world he would have good companions.
Next morning it was still raining and snowing, but the south wind
swept us bravely forward and swept the bergs from our course. In
about an hour we reached the second of the big glaciers, which I
afterwards named for Hugh Miller. We rowed up its fiord and landed to
make a slight examination of its grand frontal wall. The
berg-producing portion we found to be about a mile and a half wide,
and broken into an imposing array of jagged spires and pyramids, and
flat-topped towers and battlements, of many shades of blue, from
pale, shimmering, limpid tones in the crevasses and hollows, to the
most startling, chilling, almost shrieking vitriol blue on the plain
mural spaces from which bergs had just been discharged. Back from the
front for a few miles the glacier rises in a series of wide steps, as
if this portion of the glacier had sunk in successive sections as it
reached deep water, and the sea had found its way beneath it. Beyond
this it extends indefinitely in a gently rising prairie-like expanse,
and branches along the slopes and canyons of the Fairweather Range.
Prom here a run of two hours brought us to the head of the bay, and
to the mouth of the northwest fiord, at the head of which lie the
Hoona sealing-grounds, and the great glacier now called the Pacific,
and another called the Hoona. The fiord is about five miles long, and
two miles wide at the mouth. Here our Hoona guide had a store of dry
wood, which we took aboard. Then, setting sail, we were driven wildly
up the fiord, as if the storm-wind were saying, "Go, then, if you
will, into my icy chamber; but you shall stay in until I am ready to
let you out." All this time sleety rain was falling on the bay, and
snow on the mountains; but soon after we landed the sky began to
open. 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.
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