Three
Of Them, Drawing Their Sources From Magnificent Groups Of Snowy
Mountains, Came Down To The Level Of The Sea And Formed A Glorious
Spectacle.
The middle one of the three belongs to the first class,
pouring its majestic flood, shattered and crevassed, directly into
the fiord, and crowding about twenty-five square miles of it with
bergs.
The next below it also sends off bergs occasionally, though
a narrow strip of glacial detritus separates it from the tidewater.
That forenoon a large mass fell from it, damming its draining stream,
which at length broke the dam, and the resulting flood swept forward
thousands of small bergs across the mud-flat into the fiord. In a
short time all was quiet again; the flood-waters receded, leaving
only a large blue scar on the front of the glacier and stranded bergs
on the moraine flat to tell the tale.
These two glaciers are about equal in size - two miles wide - and their
fronts are only about a mile and a half apart. While I sat sketching
them from a point among the drifting icebergs where I could see far
back into the heart of their distant fountains, two Taku
seal-hunters, father and son, came gliding toward us in an extremely
small canoe. Coming alongside with a goodnatured "Sagh-a-ya," they
inquired who we were, our objects, etc., and gave us information
about the river, their village, and two other large glaciers that
descend nearly to the sea-level a few miles up the river canyon.
Crouching in their little shell of a boat among the great bergs, with
paddle and barbed spear, they formed a picture as arctic and remote
from anything to be found in civilization as ever was sketched for us
by the explorers of the Far North.
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