rs; higher and higher they towered,
and the ice, closing in upon us, threatened a trap. The only way to
navigate safely that dangerous fiord was to keep ahead of the charging
ice. As we came up towards the end of the bay the narrowing walls of the
fiord compressed the ice until it crowded dangerously around us. Our
captain, Lot, had taken the precaution to put a false bow and stern on
his canoe, cunningly fashioned out of curved branches of trees and
hollowed with his hand-adz to fit the ends of the canoe. These were
lashed to the bow and stern by thongs of deer sinew. They were needed.
It was like penetrating an arctic ice-floe. Sometimes we would have to
skirt the granite rock and with our poles shove out the ice-cakes to
secure a passage. It was fully thirty miles to the head of the bay, but
we made it in half a day, so strong was the current of the rising tide.

I shall never forget the view that burst upon us as we rounded the last
point. The face of the glacier where it discharged its icebergs was very
narrow in comparison with the giants of Glacier Bay, but the ice cliff
was higher than even the face of Muir Glacier. The narrow canyon of hard
granite had compressed the ice of the great glacier until it had the
appearance of a frozen torrent broken into innumerable crevasses, the
great masses of ice tumbling over one another and bulging out for a few
moments before they came crashing and splashing down into the deep water
of the bay. The fiord was simply a cleft in high mountains, and the
depth of the water could only be conjectured. It must have been hundreds
of feet, perhaps thousands, from the surface of the water to the bottom
of that fissure. Smooth, polished, shining breasts of bright gray
granite crowded above the glacier on every side, seeming to overhang the
ice and the bay. Struggling clumps of evergreens clung to the mountain
sides below the glacier, and up, away up, dizzily to the sky towered the
walls of the canyon. Hundreds of other Alaskan glaciers excel this in
masses of ice and in grandeur of front, but none that I have seen
condense beauty and grandeur to finer results.

"What a plucky little giant!" was Muir's exclamation as we stood on a
rock-mound in front of this glacier. "To think of his shouldering his
way through the mountain range like this! Samson, pushing down the
pillars of the temple at Gaza, was nothing to this fellow. Hear him roar
and laugh!"

Without consulting me Muir named thi