Here it slipped into a small station, and everybody stepped out. Other people took their places, and then the car moved slowly downward, leaving the boys on the steep mountain side.
"My! That was great!" cried Jack. "Now what are we going to do?"
"We are going to walk across the glacier, aren't we, father?" said Joe.
"Of course we are. We have come up here to explore it, you know," said their father.
And they did explore 'way across the great ice river. In many places they had to walk very carefully, or they would have fallen into one of the deep cracks, but at last they came safely to the other side. There was no car on this side of the glacier to carry them down the mountain, but there were long ladders to help them over the very hardest and steepest places.
There was no car on this side of the glacier, but there were long ladders to help them over the steepest places
They had to climb over great ridges of rocks, which the glacier had torn away from the higher mountains years and years before. These rocks had been brought slowly down on the ice, and dropped along the sides and end of the glacier.
At last the party came to the place where the sun and the warm winds changed the glacier from a river of ice to a river of water.
"Well, boys," said their father, "we have had a look at the outside of the glacier; now let us take a look at the inside of it." So a man threw warm blankets over their shoulders, and they entered a long, narrow passage through a hole in the ice wall.