Suddenly, near the centre, the top began to incline forward, and the whole face of probably twenty yards in width, from the top of the glacier to the bottom of the bay, fell outward as a ladder would fall, without a break anywhere. There was a tremendous upheaving of the water, of course; then the report of the invariable explosion reached us, but no trace remained of the fallen ice, save the swell in the water, which had almost reached and rocked the steamer. I do not know how much time elapsed before the lovely thing rose to the surface, but it seemed an age, and then it came in a dozen pieces, each of the same exquisite diaphanous blue, which, as they approached us gradually, changed to a clear transparent sapphire.
If it will help to serve the purpose of giving a just idea of the colossal proportions of the scene I endeavor to describe, let me say that the Capitol at Washington, the City Hall in Philadelphia, the Cathedral, the Equitable, and the Mills Buildings in New York, and all the mammoth newspaper offices in the same city might be floated in front of the Muir Glacier, and yet its emerald walls would overtop and engulf them all. As a contrast to all that is pure and chaste in the scene before us, there rushes out from the eastern end of the glacier a subglacial stream of thick, dirty water, much resembling, as it boils up from its cavernous outlet, the mud geyser of the Yellowstone. This is a perpetually flowing river, charged with sediment and débris from the scouring process produced by the friction of the moving ice along its bed of rock; it gives the water in the inlet a thick, gray color, utterly destroying the charm of its otherwise transparent character.
If you are amiable enough to say that what I have written gives a sufficiently correct idea of what you expect to see, I beg to differ from you. No camera, no pencil, no vocabulary, can do more than produce a desire to see for one’s self. I can only say that it has been my fortune to behold much that is grand in nature and in art at home and abroad, but the hours spent at Muir Glacier made the great event of my life. If God spares me, I hope to see it often. And fearing I might be accused of exaggeration, which is far from my desire, for I am searching in vain for superlatives which would do the subject justice, let me quote from others who preceded me, and all of whom have established their reputation as authorities.
Miss Kate Field says, “In Switzerland a glacier is a vast bed of dirty, air-holed ice that has fastened itself, like a cold porous plaster, to the side of an Alp. Distance alone lends enchantment to the view. In Alaska a glacier is a wonderful torrent that seems to have been suddenly frozen when about to plunge into the sea.... Think of Niagara Falls frozen stiff, add thirty-six feet to its height, and you have a slight idea of the terminus of Muir Glacier, in front of which your steamer anchors; picture a background of mountains fifteen thousand feet high, all snow-clad, and then imagine a gorgeous sun lighting up the ice-crystals with rainbow coloring. The face of the glacier takes on the hue of aqua-marine, the hue of every bit of floating ice, big and little, that surround the steamer and make navigation serious. These dazzling serpents move at the rate of sixty-four feet a day, tumbling headlong into the sea, and, as they fall, the ear is startled by submarine thunder, the echoes of which resound far and near. Down, down, down goes the berg, and woe to the boat in its way when it rises again to the surface.”
Charles Hallock in “Our New Alaska,” pp. 172-733: “The glacier wall overhung us with its mighty majesty, three times the height of the steamer’s mast or more, and we seemed none too far away to escape the constantly cleaving masses which dropped from its face with deafening detonations. The foam which gathered from the impetus of the plunges surged upward fully two-thirds of the height of the cliff, and the resulting swell tossed the large steamer like a toy, and rolled up in breakers of surf upon the beach.... The glacier is by no means smooth, but is seamed and riven in every part by clefts and fissures. It is hollowed into caverns and grottos, hung with massive stalactites, and fashioned into pinnacles and domes. Every section and configuration has its heart of translucent blue or green, interlaced or bordered by fretted frostwork of intensest white, so that the appearance is at all times gnome-like and supernatural....
“I cannot conceive how any one can sit by and contemplate without emotion the stupendous throes which give birth to the icebergs, attended with detonations like explosions of artillery, and reverberations of thunder across the sky, and the mighty wreckage which follows each convulsion. Nevertheless, I have seen a lady loll with complaisance in her steamer chair comfortably wrapped for the chilly air, and observe the astounding scene with the same languid contemplation that she would discuss her social fixtures and appointments. Zounds! I believe that such a human negation would calmly view the wrecks of worlds and hear the crack of doom at the final rendering, if it did not affect her set. She could watch, at a suitable distance, the agony of Christian martyrs, the carnage of great battles, the sweep of cyclones, the diluvial submergence. Dynamite would not appall her, but to me it would be the acme of satisfaction, ineffably supreme, to startle such clods of inanition by a cry of mouse, and electrify them into momentary emotion. No vinaigrette would ever mitigate the shock.”...
Mrs. E. R. Scidmore, in “Journeys in Alaska,” says, “Avalanches of crumbling snow and great pieces of the front were continually falling with the roar and crash of artillery, revealing new caverns and rifts of deeper blue light, while the spray dashed high and the great waves rolled along the icy wall, and, widening in their sweep, washed the blocks of floating ice up on the beaches on either side.... The nearer one approached the higher the ice-walls seemed, and all along the front there were pinnacles and spires weighing several tons, that seemed on the point of toppling every moment. The great buttresses of ice that rose first from the water and touched the moraine were as solidly white as marble, veined and streaked with rocks and mud, but farther on, as the pressure was greater, the color slowly deepened to turquoise and sapphire blues.”
MUIR GLACIER, ALASKA