My Widest Views Did Not Probably Exceed
Fifteen Miles, The Rain And Mist Making Distances Seem Greater.
On reaching the farther shore and tracing it a few miles to
northward, I found a large portion of the glacier-current sweeping
out westward in a bold and beautiful curve around the shoulder of a
mountain as if going direct to the open sea.
Leaving the main trunk,
it breaks into a magnificent uproar of pinnacles and spires and
up-heaving, splashing wave-shaped masses, a crystal cataract
incomparably greater and wilder than a score of Niagaras.
Tracing its channel three or four miles, I found that it fell into a
lake, which it fills with bergs. The front of this branch of the
glacier is about three miles wide. I first took the lake to be the
head of an arm of the sea, but, going down to its shore and tasting
it, I found it fresh, and by my aneroid perhaps less than a hundred
feet above sea-level. It is probably separated from the sea only by a
moraine dam. I had not time to go around its shores, as it was now
near five o'clock and I was about fifteen miles from camp, and I had
to make haste to recross the glacier before dark, which would come on
about eight o'clock. I therefore made haste up to the main glacier,
and, shaping my course by compass and the structure lines of the ice,
set off from the land out on to the grand crystal prairie again. All
was so silent and so concentred, owing to the low dragging mist, the
beauty close about me was all the more keenly felt, though tinged
with a dim sense of danger, as if coming events were casting shadows.
I was soon out of sight of land, and the evening dusk that on cloudy
days precedes the real night gloom came stealing on and only ice was
in sight, and the only sounds, save the low rumbling of the mills and
the rattle of falling stones at long intervals, were the low,
terribly earnest moanings of the wind or distant waterfalls coming
through the thickening gloom. After two hours of hard work I came to
a maze of crevasses of appalling depth and width which could not be
passed apparently either up or down. I traced them with firm nerve
developed by the danger, making wide jumps, poising cautiously on
dizzy edges after cutting footholds, taking wide crevasses at a grand
leap at once frightful and inspiring. Many a mile was thus traveled,
mostly up and down the glacier, making but little real headway,
running much of the time as the danger of having to pass the night on
the ice became more and more imminent. This I could do, though with
the weather and my rain-soaked condition it would be trying at best.
In treading the mazes of this crevassed section I had frequently to
cross bridges that were only knife-edges for twenty or thirty feet,
cutting off the sharp tops and leaving them flat so that little
Stickeen could follow me.
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