The Point
Reached By Vegetation Shows That The Surf Dashes Up To A Height Of
About Seventy-Five Or A Hundred Feet.
We were awe-stricken and began
to fear that we might be upset should the ocean waves rise still
higher.
But little Stickeen seemed to enjoy the storm, and gazed at
the foam-wreathed cliffs like a dreamy, comfortable tourist admiring
a sunset. We reached the mouth of Taylor Bay about two or three
o'clock in the afternoon, when we had a view of the open ocean before
we entered the bay. Many large bergs from Glacier Bay were seen
drifting out to sea past Cape Spencer. We reached the head of the
fiord now called Taylor Bay at five o'clock and camped near an
immense glacier with a front about three miles wide stretching across
from wall to wall. No icebergs are discharged from it, as it is
separated from the water of the fiord at high tide by a low, smooth
mass of outspread, overswept moraine material, netted with torrents
and small shallow rills from the glacier-front, with here and there
a lakelet, and patches of yellow mosses and garden spots bright with
epilobium, saxifrage, grass-tufts, sedges, and creeping willows on
the higher ground. But only the mosses were sufficiently abundant
to make conspicuous masses of color to relieve the dull slaty gray
of the glacial mud and gravel. The front of the glacier, like
all those which do not discharge icebergs, is rounded like a
brow, smooth-looking in general views, but cleft and furrowed,
nevertheless, with chasms and grooves in which the light glows and
shimmers in glorious beauty.
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