CHAPTER IV.
THE GLACIER.
How shall I describe the scene which steadily opened to us as we steamed rapidly up the fiord.
Imagine it! The fiord is two miles wide; the valley beyond is of corresponding width, and the glacier fills it perfectly. How thick it is, of course, can not be told, but hundreds of feet it must be everywhere; it is probably from one to two thousand feet in many places. The banks of the fiord continued to be the banks of the glacier for about ten miles, gradually vanishing to a wedge-like point, and merging then into the great mer de glace, which, expanding to the right and left above the highest hills, carries the eye away upon its boundless surface as upon the ocean.
At length the inclined plane was lost; the distant line of the mer de glace was lost also, and we were beneath a line of ice-cliffs from one to two hundred feet high, as clear as the purest crystal, and emblazoned with all the hues of heaven.
A cold shudder crept over me as the vessel steamed in close to the front of this great reservoir of frost. The sound of falling waters filled the air, and ever and anon deep sounds, which seemed like convulsions of the earth, were emitted from it. The falling waters were of melted snow and ice from the surface of the glacier, which, gathering into streams of considerable size, leaped over the cliffs, and sent a cloud of spray floating away upon the air to resolve the sun’s rays, giving back to the eye the fluttering fragment of a rainbow. The sounds were occasioned by the movement of the glacier in its bed, and the resulting chasms which opened from time to time in the ice.
FRONT OF THE GLACIER.
We probably enjoyed here an opportunity such as was never enjoyed by any previous explorer. I know of no glacier accessible as this is, for the reason that the fiords are interrupted either with islands or shoals, which, by preventing the free discharge of the icebergs that break from the glacier front, render the navigation of the waters quite impossible, even to a boat. Such is the character of the glacier of Jacobshavn, in Disco Bay, North Greenland, which I have made the most strenuous efforts to ascend, and which is crowded with a perfect wilderness of icebergs for the space of nearly thirty miles, often being so tightly packed together as to be scarcely distinguishable from the surface of the glacier itself, even when one looks down upon the fiord from an elevation of a thousand feet.
But the fiord of Sermitsialik presents no such embarrassing feature. The water steadily deepens from the glacier front (where in one place it is 270 fathoms) towards the sea; and the current being rapid, owing to causes which I shall presently have occasion to explain, the icebergs float away as fast as formed. While coming up, we passed several of large and many of small size, but none of them were aground, and all were hurrying out to the ocean, as if in haste to mingle their crystal particles with the rolling waves, and once more enjoy the freedom of the boundless sea.