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. It shows grandly from
where it broke on our sight, sweeping boldly forward and downward in
its majestic channel, swaying from side to side in graceful fluent
lines around stern unflinching rocks. While I stood in the canoe
making a sketch of it, several bergs came off with tremendous dashing
and thunder, raising a cloud of ice-dust and spray to a height of a
hundred feet or more.
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