Beyond,
In A Cloudless Blaze Of Sunshine, I Saw Many Tributaries, Pure And
White As New-Fallen Snow, Drawing Their Sources From Clusters Of
Peaks And Sweeping Down Waving Slopes To Unite Their Crystal Currents
With The Trunk Glacier In The Central Canyon.
This fine glacier
reaches to within two hundred and fifty feet of the level of the sea,
and would even yet reach the fiord and send off bergs but for the
waste it suffers in flowing slowly through the trunk canyon, the
declivity of which is very slight.
Returning, I reached camp and breakfast at ten o'clock; then had
everything packed into the canoe, and set off leisurely across the
fiord to the mouth of another wide and low canyon, whose lofty outer
cliffs, facing the fiord, are telling glacial advertisements. Gladly
I should have explored it all, traced its streams of water and
streams of ice, and entered its highest chambers, the homes and
fountains of the snow. But I had to wait. I only stopped an hour or
two, and climbed to the top of a rock through the common underbrush,
whence I had a good general view. The front of the main glacier is
not far distant from the fiord, and sends off small bergs into a
lake. The walls of its tributary canyons are remarkably jagged and
high, cut in a red variegated rock, probably slate. On the way back
to the canoe I gathered ripe salmon-berries an inch and a half in
diameter, ripe huckleberries, too, in great abundance, and several
interesting plants I had not before met in the territory.
About noon, when the tide was in our favor, we set out on the return
trip to the gold-mine camp. The sun shone free and warm. No wind
stirred. The water spaces between the bergs were as smooth as glass,
reflecting the unclouded sky, and doubling the ravishing beauty of
the bergs as the sunlight streamed through their innumerable angles
in rainbow colors.
Soon a light breeze sprang up, and dancing lily spangles on the water
mingled their glory of light with that burning on the angles of the
ice.
On days like this, true sun-days, some of the bergs show a purplish
tinge, though most are white from the disintegrating of their
weathered surfaces. Now and then a new-born one is met that is pure
blue crystal throughout, freshly broken from the fountain or recently
exposed to the air by turning over. But in all of them, old and new,
there are azure caves and rifts of ineffable beauty, in which the
purest tones of light pulse and shimmer, lovely and untainted as
anything on earth or in the sky.
As we were passing the Indian village I presented a little tobacco to
the headmen as an expression of regard, while they gave us a few
smoked salmon, after putting many questions concerning my exploration
of their bay and bluntly declaring their disbelief in the ice
business.
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