The Drip Of The Rain On The Various Leaves Was Pleasant
To Hear.
More especially marked were the flat low-toned bumps and
splashes of large drops from the trees on the
Broad horizontal leaves
of Echinopanax horridum, like the drumming of thundershower drops
on veratrum and palm leaves, while the mosses were indescribably
beautiful, so fresh, so bright, so cheerily green, and all so low and
calm and silent, however heavy and wild the wind and the rain blowing
and pouring above them. Surely never a particle of dust has touched
leaf or crown of all these blessed mosses; and how bright were the
red rims of the cladonia cups beside them, and the fruit of the dwarf
cornel! And the wet berries, Nature's precious jewelry, how beautiful
they were! - huckleberries with pale bloom and a crystal drop on each;
red and yellow salmon-berries, with clusters of smaller drops; and
the glittering, berry-like raindrops adorning the interlacing arches
of bent grasses and sedges around the edges of the pools, every drop
a mirror with all the landscape in it. A' that and a' that and twice
as muckle's a' that in this glorious Alaska day, recalling, however
different, George Herbert's "Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright."
In the gardens and forests of this wonderful moraine one might spend
a whole joyful life.
When I at last reached the end of the great moraine and the front of
the mountain that forms the north side of the glacier basin, I tried
to make my way along its side, but, finding the climbing tedious and
difficult, took to the glacier and fared well, though a good deal of
step-cutting was required on its ragged, crevassed margin. When night
was drawing nigh, I scanned the steep mountainside in search of an
accessible bench, however narrow, where a bed and a fire might be
gathered for a camp. About dark great was my delight to find a little
shelf with a few small mountain hemlocks growing in cleavage joints.
Projecting knobs below it enabled me to build a platform for a
fireplace and a bed, and by industrious creeping from one fissure
to another, cutting bushes and small trees and sliding them down to
within reach of my rock-shelf, I made out to collect wood enough to
last through the night. In an hour or two I had a cheery fire, and
spent the night in turning from side to side, steaming and drying
after being wet two days and a night. Fortunately this night it did
not rain, but it was very cold.
Pushing on next day, I climbed to the top of the glacier by ice-steps
and along its side to the grand cataract two miles wide where the
whole majestic flood of the glacier pours like a mighty surging
river down a steep declivity in its channel. After gazing a long time
on the glorious show, I discovered a place beneath the edge of the
cataract where it flows over a hard, resisting granite rib, into which
I crawled and enjoyed the novel and instructive view of a glacier
pouring over my head, showing not only its grinding, polishing action,
but how it breaks off large angular boulder-masses - a most telling
lesson in earth-sculpture, confirming many I had already learned in
the glacier basins of the High Sierra of California.
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