It would be difficult to imagine any thing more startling to the imagination or more suggestive to the mind than the scene presented by this two miles of ice coast-line, as I rowed along within a few fathoms of it. The glacier was broken up into the most singular shapes, and presented nothing of that uniformity usual to the glacier's face. It was worn and wasted away until it seemed like the front of some vast incongruous temple,—here a groined roof of some huge cathedral, and there a pointed window or a Norman door-way deeply molded; while on all sides were pillars round and fluted, and pendants dripping crystal drops of the purest water, and all bathed in a soft, blue atmosphere. Above these wondrous archways and galleries there was still preserved the same Gothic character,—tall spires and pinnacles rose along the entire front and multiplied behind them, and new forms met the eye continually. The play of light and the magical softness of the color of the sea and ice was perfectly charming, as the scene I have heretofore described among the icebergs. Strange, there was nothing cold or forbidding anywhere. The ice seemed to take the warmth which suffused the air, and I longed to pull my boat far within the openings, and paddle beneath the Gothic archways. The dangers from falling ice alone prevented me from entering one of the largest of them.
GLACIER STREAM.
Pulling around to the west side of the glacier, I clambered up a steep declivity over a pile of mud and rock, which the expanding and moving ice had pushed out from its bed. Once at the top of this yielding slope, the eye was met by a perfect forest of spires; but it was not easy to get on the glacier itself. Along its margin, half in mud and rock and half in ice, a torrent of dirty water came tearing along at a furious pace, disclosing the laminated structure of the ice in a very beautiful manner; and this was not easily crossed. At length, however, I came to a spot where the chief feeder of this rushing stream branched off at right angles, coming from the glacier itself, and I had no difficulty in wading across above the junction of the two arms. Following thence up the eastward branch as it dashed wildly down in a succession of cataracts, cutting squarely across the laminæ or strata (which lay at an angle of about 35°), I came at length to a place where the ice was much disturbed, and rose by broken steps from the plain on which I stood to the height of about one hundred and fifty feet, and right out from this wall came the rushing torrent, hissing and foaming from a monstrous tunnel, to which the Croton Aqueduct would be a pigmy. It was a strange sight. The ice was perfectly pure and transparent; and yet, out of its very heart, was pouring the muddy stream of which I have made mention, and which, although the comparison is rather remote, reminded me of the image which Virgil draws of the Tiber, when Æneas first beheld its turbid waters, pouring out from beneath the bright and lovely foliage which overspread it.
The tunnel out of which the waters poured was about ten yards wide and as many high, the supporting roof being composed of every form of Gothic arch, fretted and fluted in the most marvelous manner, and pure as the most stainless alabaster; yet the distant effect within the tunnel was quite different,—the dark stream beneath being reflected above; and truly, if I might be allowed to paraphrase a line of Dryden,—
"The muddy bottom o'er the arch was thrown."
I clambered within this tunnel as far as I could, along a slippery shelf above the tumbling waters, until the light was almost shut out behind me, but far enough to perceive that, on my right hand, other tunnels discharged into this main sewer, as the underground culverts which drain into the main artery the refuse of a city.
CLIMBING THE GLACIER.
Returning to the open air, I pursued my way up the glacier for a couple of miles further, and discovered that this stream had its origin in the mountain on the right, where the melting snows rolled over the rocky slope, evidently by a newly formed channel, for the water was tearing through moss-beds and deposits of sand and silt, and, rushing thence on the glacier, tumbled headlong hundreds and hundreds of feet, down into a yawning chasm. This chasm or crevasse no doubt extended to the bottom of the glacier, and the water, after winding along the rocky bed under the ice, finally has found its way into the cracks formed by the ice in its descent over a steep and rugged declivity, and has slowly worn away the tunnels or culverts which I have described.
I had now come to the gorge in the mountain through which the glacier descends to the sea. The view of the glacier from the margin is, at this point, somewhat like what I fancy the mer de glace at Trélaporte, in the Alps, would be if the Grande Jorasse and Mont Tacul, and the other mountains which form the cradle for the glacier de Léchaud and the glacier du Géant, and their tributaries, were all leveled. Instead of the variety disclosed in the Alpine view, the eye lights here upon one expanding stream instead of many streams, which narrows as it approaches the pass until it is about two miles over; thence descending the steep declivity to the sea, breaking up as it moves over the rougher places in the manner before described.
GRANDEUR OF THE GLACIERS.