You know the fiords. You've met them in your geography. This is a fiord on the Norway coast. Notice how smooth the walls of the mountains are. They were trimmed down by the ice, which also plowed off their soil. We are here looking up what was once a river valley, but the glacier cut it down below sea level, and this is sea water. Notice in the openings of the mountains all the way up the valley where the tributaries of the ancient river flowed in then as now.
HOW THIS MR. CÆSAR IS TRANSLATED
No one scratch can be followed far. The composition is, like Cæsar's, in short sentences, whole episodes in a word: "Veni, vidi, vici." But a series of scratches all run in one general direction—north and south. To get at the meaning—just as in construing Cæsar—you must take the context; what goes before and after.
The sides of the valleys of the Alps from 1,000 to 2,000 feet above the surface of the glaciers of our own time are scratched and furrowed in the same way. Here we catch Mr. Glacier almost in the very act of writing.
THE HANDWRITING OF THE TWO CÆSARS
To do this writing, our Cæsar, like the Cæsar of the High School, used a stylus. Mr. Glacier's stylus, as we know, was made of stone held fast in his icy grip ([page 121]). And here is another curious resemblance between the manuscripts of Mr. G. Cæsar and Mr. J. Cæsar. They both wrote in straight lines. The reason Julius Cæsar and other Roman gentlemen wrote in letters made of straight lines was that they scratched these letters on tablets covered with wax, using a sharpened piece of iron or ivory. You can see it would be much easier with such writing tools and material to form letters in straight lines than to write in flowing, rounded and connected lines as we do so easily with a nice flexible pen on a smooth surface.
HOW THE OLD MEN CHANGED A "V" TO A "U"
Here is something else about the story of the Old Men of the Mountain that is a curious reminder of the Romans and their letters. The Romans had no letter U in their alphabet and so V had to do a double duty; it had to be a V and then when asked, had to take its place in line and pretend to be a U. For instance, a Roman who wanted to write the word "number" would do it in this way: "NVMERO." After a while, in the history of the growth of our alphabet, the V that was intended for U was rounded at the bottom.
Now, curiously enough, the writing of the Old Men of the Mountain has gone through the same process. River valleys in mountain regions, as elsewhere, are originally V-shaped, but where glaciers flowed down these valleys they not only made them wider but rounded out the bottoms so that they became U-shaped. Look at the valley in the Wind River range in Wyoming shown in the geologies. You notice the farther your eye goes up into the mountains the more V-shaped the valley becomes. Back toward antiquity, you see, when they had nothing but V!
