numbered a full hundred, and for three weeks
were confined to pretty close quarters. Passing the hours thus, and
felicitating ourselves upon the complete success of the voyage, we were
in the happiest humor, and amiably awaited our next experience.

Presently we ran under a wooded height that shut off the base of a great
snow-capped mountain. The peak was celestial in its beauty,--a wraith
dimly outlined upon the diaphanous sky, of which it seemed a more
palpable part. When we had rounded this point we came face to face with
a glacier. We saw at a glance the length and the breadth of it as it
plowed slowly down between lofty rock-ridges to within a mile and a half
of the shore. This was our first sight of one of those omnipotent
architects of nature, and we watched it with a thrill of awe.

Picture to yourself a vast river, two or three miles in breadth, pouring
down from the eminence of an icy peak thirty miles away,--a river fed by
numerous lateral tributaries that flow in from every declivity. Imagine
this river lashed to a fury and covered from end to end, fathoms deep,
with foam, and then the whole suddenly frozen and fixed for
evermore--that is your glacier. Sometimes the surface is stained with
the _debris_ of the mountain; sometimes the bluish-green tinge of the
ancient ice crops out. Generally the surface is as white as down and
very fair to look upon; for at a distance--we were about eight miles
from the lower edge of it--the eye detects no flaw. It might be a
torrent of milk and honey. It might almost be compared in its
immaculate beauty to one of the rivers of Paradise that flow hard by
the throne of God. It seems to be moving in majesty, and yet is
stationary, or nearly so; for we might sit by its frozen shore and grow
gray with watching, and ever our dull eyes could detect no change in a
ripple of it. A river of Paradise, indeed, escaped from the gardens of
the blessed; but, overcome by the squalor of this little globe, it has
stopped short and turned to ice in its alabaster bed.

One evening, about 8.30 o'clock, the sun still high above the western
mountain range, we found ourselves opposite the Davidson glacier. It
passes out of a broad ravine and spreads fanlike upon the shore under
the neighboring cliffs. It is three miles in breadth along the front,
and is twelve hundred feet in height when it begins to crumble and slope
toward the shore. A terminal moraine, a mile and a half in depth,
separates it