There is no air so indescribably, thrillingly sweet as the air of a glacier on a fair day. It seems to palpitate with a fragrance that ravishes the senses. I saw a great, recently captured bear, chained on the hurricane deck of a steamer, stand with his nose stretched out toward the glacier, his nostrils quivering and a look of almost human longing and rebellion in his small eyes. The feeling of pain and pity with which a humane person always beholds a chained wild animal is accented in these wide and noble spaces swimming from snow mountain to snow mountain, where the very watchword of the silence seems to be "Freedom." The chained bear recognized the scent of the glacier and remembered that he had once been free.
In front of the glacier stretched miles of sapphire, sunlit sea, set with sparkling, opaline-tinted icebergs. Now and then one broke and fell apart before our eyes, sending up a funnel-shaped spray of color,—rose, pale green, or azure.
At every blast of the steamer's whistle great masses of ice came thundering headlong into the sea—to emerge presently, icebergs. Canoeists approach glaciers closely at their peril, never knowing when an iceberg may shoot to the surface and wreck their boat. Even larger craft are by no means safe, and tourists desiring a close approach should voyage with intrepid captains who sail safely through everything.
The wide, ceaseless sweep of a live glacier down the side of a great mountain and out into the sea holds a more compelling suggestion of power than any other action of nature. I have never felt the appeal of a mountain glacier—of a stream of ice and snow that, so far as the eye can discover, never reaches anywhere, although it keeps going forever. The feeling of forlornness with which, after years of anticipation, I finally beheld the renowned glacier of the Selkirks, will never be forgotten. It was the forlornness of a child who has been robbed of her Santa Claus, or who has found that her doll is stuffed with sawdust.
But to behold the splendid, perpendicular front of a live glacier rising out of a sea which breaks everlastingly upon it; to see it under the rose and lavender of sunset or the dull gold of noon; to see and hear tower, minaret, dome, go thundering down into the clear depths and pound them into foam—this alone is worth the price of a trip to Alaska.
We were told that the opaline coloring of the glacier was unusual, and that its prevailing color is an intense blue, more beautiful and constant than that of other glaciers; and that even the bergs floating out from it were of a more pronounced blue than other bergs.
But I do not believe it. I have seen the blue of the Columbia Glacier in Prince William Sound; and I have sailed for a whole afternoon among the intensely blue ice shallops that go drifting in an endless fleet from Glacier Bay out through Icy Straits to the ocean. If there be a more exquisite blue this side of heaven than I have seen in Icy Straits and in the palisades of the Columbia Glacier, I must see it to believe it.
There are three glaciers in Taku Inlet: two—Windham and Twin—which are at present "dead"; and Taku, the Beautiful, which is very much alive. The latter was named Foster, for the former Secretary of the Treasury; but the Indian name has clung to it, which is one more cause for thanksgiving.
The Inlet is eighteen miles long and about seven hundred feet wide. Taku River flows into it from the northeast, spreading out in blue ribbons over the brown flats; at high tide it may be navigated, with caution, by small row-boats and canoes. It was explored in early days by the Hudson Bay Company, also by surveyors of the Western Union Telegraph Company.
Whidbey, entering the Inlet in 1794, sustained his reputation for absolute blindness to beauty. He found "a compact body of ice extending some distance nearly all around." He found "frozen mountains," "rock sides," "dwarf pine trees," and "undissolving frost and snow." He lamented the lack of a suitable landing-place for boats; and reported the aspect in general to be "as dreary and inhospitable as the imagination can possibly suggest."