the traveller of another
type. "My God, man, where are your artists?" cried an Englishman who had
come to St. Mary Lake to spend a night and was finishing his week. "They
ought to be here in regiments. Not that this is the greatest thing in
the world, but that there's nothing else in the world like it." Yet this
emotional traveller, who had seen the Himalayas, Andes, and Canadian
Rockies, could not tell me clearly why it was different. Neither could
the others explain why they liked it better than the Canadian Rockies,
or why its beauty puzzled and disturbed them. It is only he whom
intelligent travel has educated to analyze and distinguish who sees in
the fineness and the extraordinary distinction of Glacier's mountain
forms the completion of the more heroic undevelopment north of the
border.

II

The elements of Glacier's personality are so unusual that it will be
difficult, if not impossible, to make phrase describe it. Comparison
fails. Photographs will help, but not very efficiently, because they do
not convey its size, color, and reality; or perhaps I should say its
unreality, for there are places like Two Medicine Lake in still pale
mid-morning, St. Mary Lake during one of its gold sunsets, and the
cirques of the South Fork of the Belly River under all conditions which
never can seem actual.

To picture Glacier as nearly as possible, imagine two mountain ranges
roughly parallel in the north, where they pass the continental divide
between them across a magnificent high intervening valley, and, in the
south, merging into a wild and apparently planless massing of high peaks
and ranges. Imagine these mountains repeating everywhere huge pyramids,
enormous stone gables, elongated cones, and many other unusual shapes,
including numerous saw-toothed edges which rise many thousand feet
upward from swelling sides, and suggest nothing so much as overturned
keel-boats. Imagine ranges glacier-bitten alternately on either side
with cirques of three or four thousand feet of precipitous depth.
Imagine these cirques often so nearly meeting that the intervening walls
are knife-like edges; miles of such walls carry the continental divide,
and occasionally these cirques meet and the intervening wall crumbles
and leaves a pass across the divide. Imagine places where cirque walls
have been so bitten outside as well as in that they stand like
amphitheatres builded up from foundations instead of gouged out of rock
from above.