ce from my
memory the sight and the sensation of that moment. To say that I was
transfixed, speechless, fascinated to intoxication by the spell of this
marvellous development is no exaggeration. Those who reached the deck
first seemed paralyzed, halted, and thus blockaded the way for those who
were to follow; others kept within the saloon from choice, as though
they dreaded some phenomenal convulsion. I wedged my way as best I
could, after the first shock of amazement had subsided, up to the very
bow of the ship.

Upon each side of me, half a mile away, rose the same old mountains
which I had seen everywhere from Tacoma north; at my feet the same
Pacific Ocean, but in front of me, apparently so close that I could
almost reach it with my fingers, the perpendicular wall of a canyon, not
of rock, nor clay, nor grass, nor forest, but of ice,--a wall of ice a
mile in length; and when I say a mile, I mean over eighteen hundred
yards of it; and when I speak of ice, I do not mean the sooty, porous
stuff that lodges in the valleys of the Alps; I mean the veritable,
pure, clear, crystal ice of the ice-pitcher. A wall a hundred yards
high, and in some places towering up an additional fifty; a wall
extending down deeper in the ocean than it reaches from the ocean to the
sky; hard as adamant, sharp and edged like flint, aqua-marine in color,
deepening towards the water into indigo, tipped on the summits and
projections with a froth of snow. If I did not know that it was ice, I
should believe that it was glass. If I did not know that it was the work
of the Creator, I should believe that here had assembled a convocation
of architects, who in their collective ingenuity had reproduced a
combination of the chefs-d'oeuvre of their art; for here were the
buttresses of the English abbeys, and flying buttresses of Notre Dame,
turrets of the Normans, towers of the early English, spires of the
cathedral in Cologne, wonderful unoccupied niches, pilasters of the
purest white marble and green malachite, and decorative carving and high
polish worthy of Cellini.

It was a cloudy day, yet the front glistened with prismatic splendor.
What will it be, I asked myself, if in the afternoon the setting sun
shall light it up? But we are too close to it for our own safety, we
learn, and are slowly moved back half a mile, where our anchor is
dropped and preparations are made to row us on shore to climb to the top
of the glacier. While we are moving a sharp