Spray rose about two hundred feet.
Lovely reflections showed of the pale-blue tones of the ice-wall and
mountains in the calm water.
Mirages are common, making the stranded
bergs along the shore look like the sheer frontal wall of the glacier
from which they were discharged.
I am watching the ice-wall, berg life and behavior, etc. Yesterday
and to-day a solitary small flycatcher was feeding about camp. A
sandpiper on the shore, loons, ducks, gulls, and crows, a few of
each, and a bald eagle are all the birds I have noticed thus far. The
glacier is thundering gloriously.
June 30. Clearing clouds and sunshine. In less than a minute I saw
three large bergs born. First there is usually a preliminary
thundering of comparatively small masses as the large mass begins to
fall, then the grand crash and boom and reverberating roaring.
Oftentimes three or four heavy main throbbing thuds and booming
explosions are heard as the main mass falls in several pieces, and
also secondary thuds and thunderings as the mass or masses plunge and
rise again and again ere they come to rest. Seldom, if ever, do the
towers, battlements, and pinnacles into which the front of the
glacier is broken fall forward headlong from their bases like falling
trees at the water-level or above or below it. They mostly sink
vertically or nearly so, as if undermined by the melting action of
the water of the inlet, occasionally maintaining their upright
position after sinking far below the level of the water, and rising
again a hundred feet or more into the air with water streaming like
hair down their sides from their crowns, then launch forward and fall
flat with yet another thundering report, raising spray in
magnificent, flamelike, radiating jets and sheets, occasionally to
the very top of the front wall.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 281 of 316
Words from 76097 to 76413
of 85542
