After Being Ferried In This Way Over Several
More Of These Glacial Streams, We At Length Reached The Foot Of The
Glacier Wall.
The doctor simply played tag on it, touched it gently
as if it were a dangerous wild beast, and hurried back to the boat,
taking the portage Indian with him for safety, little knowing what he
was missing.
Mr. Young and I traced the glorious crystal wall,
admiring its wonderful architecture, the play of light in the rifts
and caverns, and the structure of the ice as displayed in the less
fractured sections, finding fresh beauty everywhere and facts for
study. We then tried to climb it, and by dint of patient zigzagging
and doubling among the crevasses, and cutting steps here and there,
we made our way up over the brow and back a mile or two to a height
of about seven hundred feet. The whole front of the glacier is gashed
and sculptured into a maze of shallow caves and crevasses, and a
bewildering variety of novel architectural forms, clusters of
glittering lance-tipped spires, gables, and obelisks, bold
outstanding bastions and plain mural cliffs, adorned along the top
with fretted cornice and battlement, while every gorge and crevasse,
groove and hollow, was filled with light, shimmering and throbbing in
pale-blue tones of ineffable tenderness and beauty. The day was warm,
and back on the broad melting bosom of the glacier beyond the
crevassed front, many streams were rejoicing, gurgling, ringing,
singing, in frictionless channels worn down through the white
disintegrated ice of the surface into the quick and living blue, in
which they flowed with a grace of motion and flashing of light to be
found only on the crystal hillocks and ravines of a glacier.
Along the sides of the glacier we saw the mighty flood grinding
against the granite walls with tremendous pressure, rounding
outswelling bosses, and deepening the retreating hollows into the
forms they are destined to have when, in the fullness of appointed
time, the huge ice tool shall be withdrawn by the sun. Every feature
glowed with intention, reflecting the plans of God. Back a few miles
from the front, the glacier is now probably but little more than a
thousand feet deep; but when we examine the records on the walls, the
rounded, grooved, striated, and polished features so surely glacial,
we learn that in the earlier days of the ice age they were all
over-swept, and that this glacier has flowed at a height of from
three to four thousand feet above its present level, when it was at
least a mile deep.
Standing here, with facts so fresh and telling and held up so vividly
before us, every seeing observer, not to say geologist, must readily
apprehend the earth-sculpturing, landscape-making action of flowing
ice. And here, too, one learns that the world, though made, is yet
being made; that this is still the morning of creation; that
mountains long conceived are now being born, channels traced for
coming rivers, basins hollowed for lakes; that moraine soil is being
ground and outspread for coming plants, - coarse boulders and gravel
for forests, finer soil for grasses and flowers, - while the finest
part of the grist, seen hastening out to sea in the draining streams,
is being stored away in darkness and builded particle on particle,
cementing and crystallizing, to make the mountains and valleys and
plains of other predestined landscapes, to be followed by still
others in endless rhythm and beauty.
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