We shot through the mouth of the canyon at dangerous speed. Indeed, we
could not do otherwise; we were helpless in the grasp of the torrent. At
certain stages the surging tide forms an actual fall, for the entrance
is so narrow that the water heaps up and pours over. We took the
beginning of the flood tide, and so escaped that danger; but our speed
must have been, at the narrows, twenty miles an hour. Then, suddenly,
the bay widened out, the water ceased to swirl and boil and the current
became gentle.

When we could lay aside our paddles and look up, one of the most
glorious views of the whole world "smote us in the face," and Muir's
chant arose, "Praise God from whom all blessings flow."

Before entering this bay I had expressed a wish to see Yosemite Valley.
Now Muir said: "There is your Yosemite; only this one is on much the
grander scale. Yonder towers El Capitan, grown to twice his natural
size; there are the Sentinel, and the majestic Dome; and see all the
falls. Those three have some resemblance to Yosemite Falls, Nevada and
Bridal Veil; but the mountain breasts from which they leap are much
higher than in Yosemite, and the sheer drop much greater. And there are
so many more of these and they fall into the sea. We'll call this
Yosemite Bay--a bigger Yosemite, as Alaska is bigger than California."

Two very beautiful glaciers lay at the head of this canyon. They did not
descend to the water, but the narrow strip of moraine matter without
vegetation upon it between the glaciers and the bay showed that it had
not been long since they were glaciers of the first class, sending out a
stream of icebergs to join those from the Young Glacier. These glaciers
stretched away miles and miles, like two great antennae, from the head of
the bay to the top of the mountain range. But the most striking features
of this scene were the wonderfully rounded and polished granite breasts
of these great heights. In one stretch of about a mile on either side of
the narrow bay parallel mouldings, like massive cornices of gray
granite, five or six thousand feet high, overhung the water. These had
been fluted and rounded and polished by the glacier stream, until they
seemed like the upper walls and Corinthian capitals of a great temple.
The power of the ice stream could be seen in the striated shoulders of
these cliffs. What awful force that tool of steel-like ice must have
possessed, driven by millions of tons of weight, to mould and shape