The Prolonged Roar Of Its Fall Comes With
Startling Effect, And Heavy Swells Are Raised That Haste Away In
Every Direction To Tell What Has Taken Place, And Tens Of Thousands
Of Its Neighbors Rock And Swash In Sympathy, Repeating The News Over
And Over Again.
We were too near several large ones that fell apart
as we passed them, and our canoe had narrow escapes.
The
seal-hunters, Tyeen says, are frequently lost in these sudden berg
accidents.
In the afternoon, while we were admiring the scenery, which, as we
approached the head of the fiord, became more and more sublime, one
of our Indians called attention to a flock of wild goats on a
mountain overhead, and soon afterwards we saw two other flocks, at a
height of about fifteen hundred feet, relieved against the mountains
as white spots. They are abundant here and throughout the Alaskan
Alps in general, feeding on the grassy slopes above the timber-line.
Their long, yellowish hair is shed at this time of year and they were
snowy white. None of nature's cattle are better fed or better
protected from the cold. Tyeen told us that before the introduction
of guns they used to hunt them with spears, chasing them with their
wolf-dogs, and thus bringing them to bay among the rocks, where they
were easily approached and killed.
The upper half of the fiord is about from a mile to a mile and a half
wide, and shut in by sublime Yosemite cliffs, nobly sculptured, and
adorned with waterfalls and fringes of trees, bushes, and patches of
flowers; but amid so crowded a display of novel beauty it was not
easy to concentrate the attention long enough on any portion of it
without giving more days and years than our lives could afford. I was
determined to see at least the grand fountain of all this ice. As we
passed headland after headland, hoping as each was rounded we should
obtain a view of it, it still remained hidden.
"Ice-mountain hi yu kumtux hide," - glaciers know how to hide
extremely well, - said Tyeen, as he rested for a moment after rounding
a huge granite shoulder of the wall whence we expected to gain a view
of the extreme head of the fiord. The bergs, however, were less
closely packed and we made good progress, and at half-past eight
o'clock, fourteen and a half hours after setting out, the great
glacier came in sight at the head of a branch of the fiord that comes
in from the northeast.
The discharging front of this fertile, fast-flowing glacier is about
three quarters of a mile wide, and probably eight or nine hundred
feet deep, about one hundred and fifty feet of its depth rising above
the water as a grand blue barrier wall. It is much wider a few miles
farther back, the front being jammed between sheer granite walls from
thirty-five hundred to four thousand feet high.
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