The Glacier And The Mountains About It Are On So Grand A Scale And So
Generally Inaccessible In The Ordinary Sense, It Seemed To Matter But
Little What Course I Pursued.
Everything was full of interest, even
the weather, though about as unfavorable as possible for wide views,
and scrambling through the moraine jungle brush kept one as wet as if
all the way was beneath a cascade.
I pushed on, with many a rest and halt to admire the bold and
marvelously sculptured ice-front, looking all the grander and more
striking in the gray mist with all the rest of the glacier shut out,
until I came to a lake about two hundred yards wide and two miles
long with scores of small bergs floating in it, some aground, close
inshore against the moraine, the light playing on their angles and
shimmering in their blue caves in ravishing tones. This proved to be
the largest of the series of narrow lakelets that lie in shallow
troughs between the moraine and the glacier, a miniature Arctic
Ocean, its ice-cliffs played upon by whispering, rippling waveless
and its small berg floes drifting in its currents or with the wind,
or stranded here and there along its rocky moraine shore.
Hundreds of small rills and good-sized streams were falling into the
lake from the glacier, singing in low tones, some of them pouring in
sheer falls over blue cliffs from narrow ice-valleys, some spouting
from pipelike channels in the solid front of the glacier, others
gurgling out of arched openings at the base.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 105 of 316
Words from 28601 to 28865
of 85542