View to the establishment of a church and
school in their principal village; the merchant and his party were
bent on business and scenery; while my mind was on the mountains,
glaciers, and forests.
This was toward the end of July, in the very brightest and best of
Alaska summer weather, when the icy mountains towering in the pearly
sky were displayed in all their glory, and the islands at their feet
seemed to float and drowse on the shining mirror waters.
After we had passed through the Wrangell Narrows, the mountains of
the mainland came in full view, gloriously arrayed in snow and ice,
some of the largest and most river-like of the glaciers flowing
through wide, high-walled valleys like Yosemite, their sources far
back and concealed, others in plain sight, from their highest
fountains to the level of the sea.
Cares of every kind were quickly forgotten, and though the Cassiar
engines soon began to wheeze and sigh with doleful solemnity,
suggesting coming trouble, we were too happy to mind them. Every face
glowed with natural love of wild beauty. The islands were seen in
long perspective, their forests dark green in the foreground, with
varying tones of blue growing more and more tender in the distance;
bays full of hazy shadows, graduating into open, silvery fields of
light, and lofty headlands with fine arching insteps dipping their
feet in the shining water. But every eye was turned to the mountains.
Forgotten now were the Chilcats and missions while the word of God
was being read in these majestic hieroglyphics blazoned along the
sky. The earnest, childish wonderment with which this glorious page
of Nature's Bible was contemplated was delightful to see. All evinced
eager desire to learn.
"Is that a glacier," they asked, "down in that canyon? And is it all
solid ice?"
"Yes."
"How deep is it?"
"Perhaps five hundred or a thousand feet."
"You say it flows. How can hard ice flow?"
"It flows like water, though invisibly slow."
"And where does it come from?"
"From snow that is heaped up every winter on the mountains."
"And how, then, is the snow changed into ice?"
"It is welded by the pressure of its own weight."
"Are these white masses we see in the hollows glaciers also?"
"Yes."
"Are those bluish draggled masses hanging down from beneath the
snow-fields what you call the snouts of the glaciers?"
"Yes."
"What made the hollows they are in?"
"The glaciers themselves, just as traveling animals make their own
tracks."
"How long have they been there?"
"Numberless centuries," etc. I answered as best I could, keeping up a
running commentary on the subject in general, while busily engaged in
sketching and noting my own observations, preaching glacial gospel in
a rambling way, while the Cassiar, slowly wheezing and creeping along
the shore, shifted our position so that the icy canyons were opened to
view and closed again in regular succession, like the leaves of a
book.
