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.
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