[The conclusion of the story is longer than we have space to give. It will suffice to say that the survivors were gradually brought back to life and health, and that the living and the bodies of the dead alike were brought back to the United States; and that in the robust-appearing General Greely of to-day there is nothing to indicate the terrible strain of that dread winter in the realm of ice.]
THE MUIR GLACIER.
SEPTIMA M. COLLIS.
[No other country in the world possesses so many unique wonders of nature as the United States. The Yosemite Valley, Yellowstone Park, Mammoth Cave, Niagara Falls, and Sequoia Groves each stands alone in its peculiar beauty or grandeur; and to these we may add the Muir Glacier in Alaska, before which the famous glaciers of the Alps shrink into insignificance, and which has no rival outside the Arctic zone. “A Woman’s Trip to Alaska,” by Mrs. Collis, gives a vivid and picturesque description of this glacial wonder, which we here append. The sketch given is preceded by a statistical one, in which we are told that this glacier sheds from its front “one hundred and sixty million cubic feet of ice every twenty-four hours.”]
The previous chapter has briefly outlined the main facts within my knowledge concerning the Muir Glacier which I had gathered from my reading, and upon which I had to create the image of what I expected to see. True, I had seen photographs of it; yes, and I had seen photographs of the Cañon of the Yellowstone, and of the Nevada Falls, and of Niagara, just as I have seen paste diamonds; I knew their shapes, and that is all I ever gathered from their portraits. Neither the expression, nor the complexion, nor the sound of the voice of nature are to be found upon the dull surface of the photograph; you simply get the general lines, some of the shadows, very erroneous perspective, and that is all. We had come to a stand-still while we were at lunch. I had observed the slackening of speed; next the stoppage of the machinery; then the absolute stillness of the ship; and finally a darkening of the saloon. We were evidently at a halt under the shadow of some immense elevation. A passenger on tiptoe looked through the port-hole, and uttered an exclamation of amazement; then we all rushed to similar apertures; climbed on the chairs; looked over the men’s shoulders; in fact, did all kinds of unreasonable things, and at last stampeded up the companion-way to the deck.
I pray heaven that neither age nor infirmity may ever efface from my memory the sight and the sensation of that moment. To say that I was transfixed, speechless, fascinated to intoxication by the spell of this marvellous development is no exaggeration. Those who reached the deck first seemed paralyzed, halted, and thus blockaded the way for those who were to follow; others kept within the saloon from choice, as though they dreaded some phenomenal convulsion. I wedged my way as best I could, after the first shock of amazement had subsided, up to the very bow of the ship.
Upon each side of me, half a mile away, rose the same old mountains which I had seen everywhere from Tacoma north; at my feet the same Pacific Ocean, but in front of me, apparently so close that I could almost reach it with my fingers, the perpendicular wall of a cañon, not of rock, nor clay, nor grass, nor forest, but of ice,—a wall of ice a mile in length; and when I say a mile, I mean over eighteen hundred yards of it; and when I speak of ice, I do not mean the sooty, porous stuff that lodges in the valleys of the Alps; I mean the veritable, pure, clear, crystal ice of the ice-pitcher. A wall a hundred yards high, and in some places towering up an additional fifty; a wall extending down deeper in the ocean than it reaches from the ocean to the sky; hard as adamant, sharp and edged like flint, aqua-marine in color, deepening towards the water into indigo, tipped on the summits and projections with a froth of snow. If I did not know that it was ice, I should believe that it was glass. If I did not know that it was the work of the Creator, I should believe that here had assembled a convocation of architects, who in their collective ingenuity had reproduced a combination of the chefs-d’œuvre of their art; for here were the buttresses of the English abbeys, and flying buttresses of Notre Dame, turrets of the Normans, towers of the early English, spires of the cathedral in Cologne, wonderful unoccupied niches, pilasters of the purest white marble and green malachite, and decorative carving and high polish worthy of Cellini.
It was a cloudy day, yet the front glistened with prismatic splendor. What will it be, I asked myself, if in the afternoon the setting sun shall light it up? But we are too close to it for our own safety, we learn, and are slowly moved back half a mile, where our anchor is dropped and preparations are made to row us on shore to climb to the top of the glacier. While we are moving a sharp detonation rings out like the firing of a rifle, and one of the beautiful spires on the crest of the very centre of the wall is shivered into atoms, and its fragments fall with a splash four hundred feet. Later there is a report as of a cannon, but without result; this, we are told, is the parting of the sea of ice somewhere far back in its mountain home. Presently two similar explosions, evidently right close to us, followed by rumbling echoes, and over topples a huge mass weighing tons, which sinks so far that several seconds elapse before it rises to the surface, swaying to and fro until it finds its equilibrium, and then floats down the current, one more turquoise gem added to the chain which precedes it.
And this continued all day, sometimes at intervals of seconds only, sometimes of half an hour, and when we retired at night the explosion and the splash became as monotonous and periodical as the tinkling of the street-car bell or the footstep of the passer-by does at home. There was one tremendous breaking-off towards evening; the sun, as we had hoped, was out in full glory, and at the distance from which we now viewed the glacier it was a mountain of snow-covered ice chopped off in front. For many miles we could see over and beyond the façade, as though looking at a great river of snow; yet the façade itself was a face of corrugated emerald, reflecting the sun’s rays at every imaginable angle, and changing and scintillating with every movement of the ship.