Probably the drainage of fifty or more pours into this
fiord.
The average elevation at which they melt is about eighteen
hundred feet above sea-level, and all of them are residual branches
of the grand trunk that filled the fiord and overflowed its walls
when there was only one Sum Dum glacier.
The afternoon was wearing away as we pushed on and on through the
drifting bergs without our having obtained a single glimpse of the
great glacier. A Sum Dum seal-hunter, whom we met groping his way
deftly through the ice in a very small, unsplitable cottonwood canoe,
told us that the ice-mountain was yet fifteen miles away. This was
toward the middle of the afternoon, and I gave up sketching and
making notes and worked hard with the Indians to reach it before
dark. About seven o'clock we approached what seemed to be the extreme
head of the fiord, and still no great glacier in sight - only a small
one, three or four miles long, melting a thousand feet above the sea.
Presently, a narrow side opening appeared between tremendous cliffs
sheer to a height of four thousand feet or more, trending nearly at
right angles to the general trend of the fiord, and apparently
terminated by a cliff, scarcely less abrupt or high, at a distance of
a mile or two. Up this bend we toiled against wind and tide, creeping
closely along the wall on the right side, which, as we looked upward,
seemed to be leaning over, while the waves beating against the bergs
and rocks made a discouraging kind of music. At length, toward nine
o'clock, just before the gray darkness of evening fell, a long,
triumphant shout told that the glacier, so deeply and desperately
hidden, was at last hunted back to its benmost bore. A short distance
around a second bend in the canyon, I reached a point where I obtained
a good view of it as it pours its deep, broad flood into the fiord in
a majestic course from between the noble mountains, its tributaries,
each of which would be regarded elsewhere as a grand glacier,
converging from right and left from a fountain set far in the silent
fastnesses of the mountains.
"There is your lost friend," said the Indians laughing; "he says,
'Sagh-a-ya'" (how do you do)? And while berg after berg was being
born with thundering uproar, Tyeen said, "Your friend has klosh
tumtum (good heart). Hear! Like the other big-hearted one he is
firing his guns in your honor."
I stayed only long enough to make an outline sketch, and then urged
the Indians to hasten back some six miles to the mouth of a side
canyon I had noted on the way up as a place where we might camp in
case we should not find a better. After dark we had to move with
great caution through the ice. One of the Indians was stationed in
the bow with a pole to push aside the smaller fragments and look out
for the most promising openings, through which he guided us,
shouting, "Friday!
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