They could look up into the far-away, misty mountain valleys, and still the ice stretched beyond the utmost bound of sight.
As the party retraced their steps, the gentleman who had volunteered the information regarding height and distance, narrated the interesting story of the discovery of the glacier by Professor John Muir. He told them how the intrepid Scotchman, on reaching Cross Sound, had hired an ancient native guide and two or three Indians to paddle his canoe up Glacier Bay. As the mountain slopes surrounding the glacier were known to be bare of fuel, the voyagers filled their canoe with dry cedar and pine boughs, that they might have camp-fires to keep them alive in that almost Arctic atmosphere, and to cook their food.
When the Percivals reached the head of the moraine, they were so fortunate as to find the professor himself standing there, talking with friends. He was spending the summer, it seemed, in a rude hut not far below, and in company with some hardy young college students, pursuing new investigations in this marvelous land of ice and granite.
Leaving Professor Muir, after an introduction and a pleasant word or two from the famous explorer, Randolph and the rest descended to the beach, not by the long muddy path by which they had come, but by striking downward through a deep gulley, which brought them scrambling, sliding and laughing to the sand below.
On this narrow strip of seashore, where were lying great blocks of ice stranded by the ebb tide, they walked a mile or more beneath frowning ice-cliffs, to the very foot of the glacier, and indeed under it, for there was a sort of cave formed by the huge pinnacles of clear blue ice, and into this dismal opening the young people penetrated for a few yards, when a crackling sound in the gleaming walls made them rush for the open air again in mad haste. They were just in time to escape an ugly fragment of ice, weighing at least threescore pounds, which had become detached from the ceiling.
After this experience they were glad to walk back to the ship, which was now whistling a recall to its absent children. On the way Kittie stopped to trace, with the tip of her parasol, her name on the smooth sand. She began another, but after printing a large F, rubbed it out, and with a little addition of color to her cheeks, joined the rest, who were now tiptoeing across a narrow plank to the boat.
Steam was up, and the Queen began at once to work southward.
For fifteen miles she wriggled her way out of the icebergs as cautiously as she had wriggled in. Then the broad Pacific came in view, and as the bell in the engine room rang, “Ahead, full speed!” and the ship emerged from the narrow channels and gloomy, landlocked inlets of the North, the great billows softly rocked in their arms the Queen and its passengers, while they sang merrily,
“Out on an ocean all boundless we ride,
We’re homeward bound, homeward bound!”