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.
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