It Is
Scarcely Possible To Imagine Anything More Beautiful Than
The Beryl-Like Blue Of These Glaciers, And Especially As
Contrasted with the dead white of the upper expanse of snow.
The fragments which had fallen from the glacier into
The
water were floating away, and the channel with its icebergs
presented, for the space of a mile, a miniature likeness of
the Polar Sea. The boats being hauled on shore at our
dinner-hour, we were admiring from the distance of half a
mile a perpendicular cliff of ice, and were wishing that some
more fragments would fall. At last, down came a mass with
a roaring noise, and immediately we saw the smooth outline
of a wave travelling towards us. The men ran down as
quickly as they could to the boats; for the chance of their
being dashed to pieces was evident. One of the seamen just
caught hold of the bows, as the curling breaker reached it:
he was knocked over and over, but not hurt, and the boats
though thrice lifted on high and let fall again, received no
damage. This was most fortunate for us, for we were a
hundred miles distant from the ship, and we should have
been left without provisions or fire-arms. I had previously
observed that some large fragments of rock on the beach had
been lately displaced; but until seeing this wave, I did not
understand the cause. One side of the creek was formed
by a spur of mica-slate; the head by a cliff of ice about
forty feet high; and the other side by a promontory fifty
feet high, built up of huge rounded fragments of granite
and mica-slate, out of which old trees were growing.
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