nt.

Rain was falling almost constantly during the week we spent in Glacier
Bay. Now and then the clouds would lift, showing the twin peaks of La
Perouse and the majestic summits of Mts. Fairweather and Crillon. These
mighty summits, twelve thousand, fifteen thousand and sixteen thousand
feet high, respectively, pierced the sky directly above us; sometimes
they seemed to be hanging over us threateningly. Only once did the sky
completely clear; and then was preached to us the wonderful Sermon of
Glacier Bay.

Early that morning we quitted our camp on a barren rock, steering
towards Mt. Fairweather. A night of sleepless discomfort had ushered in
a bleak gray morning. Our Indians were sullen and silent, their scowling
looks resenting our relentless purpose to attain to the head of the bay.
The air was damp and raw, chilling us to the marrow. The forbidding
granite mountains, showing here and there through the fog, seemed
suddenly to push out threatening fists and shoulders at us. All night
long the ice-guns had bombarded us from four or five directions, when
the great masses of ice from living glaciers toppled into the sea,
crashing and grinding with the noise of thunder. The granite walls
hurled back the sound in reiterated peals, multiplying its volume a
hundredfold.

There was no Love apparent on that bleak, gray morning: Power was there
in appalling force. Visions of those evergreen forests that had once
clung trustingly to these mountain walls, but had been swept, one and
all, by the relentless forces of the ice and buried deep under mountains
of moraine matter, but added to the present desolation. We could not
enjoy; we could only endure. Death from overturning icebergs, from
charging tides, from mountain avalanche, threatened us.

Suddenly I heard Muir catch his breath with a fervent ejaculation. "God,
Almighty!" he said. Following his gaze towards Mt. Crillon, I saw the
summit highest of all crowned with glory indeed. It was not sunlight;
there was no appearance of shining; it was as if the Great Artist with
one sweep of His brush had laid upon the king-peak of all a crown of the
most brilliant of all colors--as if a pigment, perfectly made and
thickly spread, too delicate for crimson, too intense for pink, had
leaped in a moment upon the mountain top; "An awful rose of dawn." The
summit nearest Heaven had caught a glimpse of its glory! It was a rose
blooming in ice-fields, a love-song in the midst of a stern e