All These Water-Streams
Were Riding On The Parent Ice-Stream, Their Voices Joined In One
Grand Anthem Telling The
Wonders of their near and far-off fountains.
The lake itself is resting in a basin of ice, and the
Forested
moraine, though seemingly cut off from the glacier and probably more
than a century old, is in great part resting on buried ice left
behind as the glacier receded, and melting slowly on account of the
protection afforded by the moraine detritus, which keeps shifting and
falling on the inner face long after it is overgrown with lichens,
mosses, grasses, bushes, and even good-sized trees; these changes
going on with marvelous deliberation until in fullness of time the
whole moraine settles down upon its bedrock foundation.
The outlet of the lake is a large stream, almost a river in size,
one of the main draining streams of the glacier. I attempted to ford
it where it begins to break in rapids in passing over the moraine,
but found it too deep and rough on the bottom. I then tried to
ford at its head, where it is wider and glides smoothly out of the
lake, bracing myself against the current with a pole, but found it
too deep, and when the icy water reached my shoulders I cautiously
struggled back to the moraine. I next followed it down through the
rocky jungle to a place where in breaking across the moraine dam it
was only about thirty-five feet wide.
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