from the leaves and branches and furrowed boles, and
even from the splintered rocks and ice-crags overhead, many of the tones
soft and low and flute-like, as if each leaf and tree, crag and spire
were a tuned reed. A broad torrent, draining the side of the glacier,
now swollen by scores of new streams from the mountains, was rolling
boulders along its rocky channel, with thudding, bumping, muffled
sounds, rushing towards the bay with tremendous energy, as if in haste
to get out of the mountains; the waters above and beneath calling to
each other, and all to the ocean, their home.

Looking southward from our shelter, we had this great torrent and the
forested mountain wall above it on our left, the spiry ice-crags on our
right, and smooth gray gloom ahead. I tried to draw the marvelous scene
in my note-book, but the rain blurred the page in spite of all my pains
to shelter it, and the sketch was almost worthless. When the wind began
to abate, I traced the east side of the glacier. All the trees standing
on the edge of the woods were barked and bruised, showing high-ice mark
in a very telling way, while tens of thousands of those that had stood
for centuries on the bank of the glacier farther out lay crushed and
being crushed. In many places I could see down fifty feet or so beneath
the margin of the glacier-mill, where trunks from one to two feet in
diameter were being ground to pulp against outstanding rock-ribs and
bosses of the bank.

About three miles above the front of the glacier I climbed to the
surface of it by means of axe-steps made easy for Stickeen. As far as
the eye could reach, the level, or nearly level, glacier stretched away
indefinitely beneath the gray sky, a seemingly boundless prairie of ice.
The rain continued, and grew colder, which I did not mind, but a dim
snowy look in the drooping clouds made me hesitate about venturing far
from land. No trace of the west shore was visible, and in case the
clouds should settle and give snow, or the wind again become violent, I
feared getting caught in a tangle of crevasses. Snow-crystals, the
flowers of the mountain clouds, are frail, beautiful things, but
terrible when flying on storm-winds in darkening, benumbing swarms or
when welded together into glaciers full of deadly crevasses. Watching
the weather, I sauntered about on the crystal sea. For a mile or two out
I found the ice remarkably safe. The marginal crevasses were mostly
narrow, while the few wider