I Had Fasted Too Long To Be In Very Good Order For Hard Work, But
While The Indians Were Cooking,
I made out to push my way up the
canyon before breakfast to seek the glacier that once came into
The
fiord, knowing from the size and muddiness of the stream that drains
it that it must be quite large and not far off. I came in sight of it
after a hard scramble of two hours through thorny chaparral and
across steep avalanche taluses of rocks and snow. The front reaches
across the canyon from wall to wall, covered with rocky detritus, and
looked dark and forbidding in the shadow cast by the cliffs, while
from a low, cavelike hollow its draining stream breaks forth, a river
in size, with a reverberating roar that stirs all the canyon. 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.
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