Illumined By The Sun, The Spray And
Angular Crystal Masses Are Indescribably Beautiful.
Some of the
discharges pour in fragments from clefts in the wall like waterfalls,
white and mealy-looking, even dusty with minute swirling
ice-particles, followed by a rushing succession of thunder-tones
combining into a huge, blunt, solemn roar.
Most of these crumbling
discharges are from the excessively shattered central part of the
ice-wall; the solid deep-blue masses from the ends of the wall
forming the large bergs rise from the bottom of the glacier.
Many lesser reports are heard at a distance of a mile or more from
the fall of pinnacles into crevasses or from the opening of new
crevasses. The berg discharges are very irregular, from three to
twenty-two an hour. On one rising tide, six hours, there were sixty
bergs discharged, large enough to thunder and be heard at distances
of from three quarters to one and a half miles; and on one succeeding
falling tide, six hours, sixty-nine were discharged.
July 1. We were awakened at four o'clock this morning by the whistle
of the steamer George W. Elder. I went out on the moraine and waved
my hand in salute and was answered by a toot from the whistle. Soon a
party came ashore and asked if I was Professor Muir. The leader,
Professor Harry Fielding Reid of Cleveland, Ohio, introduced himself
and his companion, Mr. Cushing, also of Cleveland, and six or eight
young students who had come well provided with instruments to study
the glacier.
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