in descriptive notes. It
is that very fact, I believe, upon which hinges the curative value of
the sight: you are so completely absorbed by the moment, and all other
things fall away. Many and many a day have I lain in my deck chair on
board a liner and watched the play of the waves; but the pleasure,
which was very great indeed, was momentary; and sometimes, when in
an unsympathetic mood, I have since impatiently wondered in what that
fascination may have consisted. It was different here. Snow is very
nearly as yielding as water and, once it fully responds in its surface
to the carving forces of the wind, it stays--as if frozen into the
glittering marble image of its motion. I know few things that are as
truly fascinating as the sculptures of the wind in snow; for here you
have time and opportunity a-plenty to probe not only into the what,
but also into the why. Maybe that one day I shall write down a fuller
account of my observations. In this report I shall have to restrict
myself to a few indications, for this is not the record of the whims of
the wind, but merely the narrative of my drives.

In places, for instance, the rounded, "bomb-proof" aspect of the
expanses would be changed into the distinct contour of gigantic waves
with a very fine, very sharp crest-line. The upsweep from the northwest
would be ever so slightly convex, and the downward sweep into the trough
was always very distinctly concave. This was not the ripple which we
find in beach sand. That ripple was there, too, and in places it covered
the wide backs of these huge waves all over; but never was it found on
the concave side. Occasionally, but rarely, one of these great waves
would resemble a large breaker with a curly crest. Here the onward sweep
from the northwest had built the snow out, beyond the supporting base,
into a thick overhanging ledge which here and there had sagged; but
by virtue of that tensile strength and cohesion in snow which I have
mentioned already, it still held together and now looked convoluted and
ruffled in the most deceiving way. I believe I actually listened for the
muffled roar which the breaker makes when its subaqueous part begins to
sweep the upward sloping beach. To make this illusion complete, or to
break it by the very absurdity and exaggeration of a comparison drawn
out too far--I do not know which--there would, every now and then,
from the crest of one of these waves, jut out something which closely
resembled the