Several Of The Great Glaciers Of The Bay Flow
From This One Grand Fountain.
It is an instructive example of a
general glacier covering the hills and dales of a country that is
Not
yet ready to be brought to the light of day - not only covering but
creating a landscape with the features it is destined to have when,
in the fullness of time, the fashioning ice-sheet shall be lifted by
the sun, and the land become warm and fruitful. The view to the
westward is bounded and almost filled by the glorious Fairweather
Mountains, the highest among them springing aloft in sublime beauty
to a height of nearly sixteen thousand feet, while from base to
summit every peak and spire and dividing ridge of all the mighty host
was spotless white, as if painted. It would seem that snow could
never be made to lie on the steepest slopes and precipices unless
plastered on when wet, and then frozen. But this snow could not have
been wet. It must have been fixed by being driven and set in small
particles like the storm-dust of drifts, which, when in this
condition, is fixed not only on sheer cliffs, but in massive,
overcurling cornices. Along the base of this majestic range sweeps
the Pacific Glacier, fed by innumerable cascading tributaries, and
discharging into the head of its fiord by two mouths only partly
separated by the brow of an island rock about one thousand feet high,
each nearly a mile wide.
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