"I suppose if either of them gets through to the Salmon the rest will be easy."
"Dead easy!"
"It would be shorter and very much cheaper to build from Omar, through this way."
"Of course, but neither outfit knew anything about the outlet to Omar Lake until I told them—and they knew there was the canon to be reckoned with."
"Well?"
Appleton shook his head. "Look at it! Does it look like a place to build a railroad?"
"I can't tell anything about it, from here."
"I suppose a road could be built if the glaciers were on the same side of the river, but—they're not. They face each other, and they're alive, too. Listen!" The oarsmen ceased rowing at Dan's signal, and out of the northward silence came a low rumble like the sound of distant cannonading. "We must be at least twenty miles away, in an air line. The ice stands up alongside the river, hundreds of feet high, and it breaks off in chunks as big as a New York office-building."
"You've been up there?"
"No. But everybody says so, and I've seen glacier ice clear out here in the delta. They're always moving, too—the glaciers themselves—and they're filled with crevasses, so that it's dangerous to cross them on foot even if one keeps back from the river."