Sum Dum Bay 



out to push my way up the canon before breakfast 

 to seek the glacier that once came into the fiord, 

 knowing from the size and muddiness of the stream 

 that drains it that it must be quite large and not 

 far off. I came in sight of it after a hard scramble 

 of two hours through thorny chaparral and across 

 steep avalanche taluses of rocks and snow. The front 

 reaches across the canon from wall to wall, covered 

 with rocky detritus, and looked dark and forbidding 

 in the shadow cast by the cliffs, while from a low, 

 cavelike hollow its draining stream breaks forth, a 

 river in size, with a reverberating roar that stirs all 

 the canon. Beyond, in a cloudless blaze of sunshine, I 

 saw many tributaries, pure and white as new-fallen 

 snow, drawing their sources from clusters of peaks 

 and sweeping down waving slopes to unite their 

 crystal currents with the trunk glacier in the central 

 canon. This fine glacier reaches to within two hun- 

 dred and fifty feet of the level of the sea, and would 

 even yet reach the fiord and send off bergs but for the 

 waste it suffers in flowing slowly through the trunk 

 canon, the declivity of which is very slight. 



Returning, I reached camp and breakfast at ten 

 o'clock; then had everything packed into the canoe, 

 and set off leisurely across the fiord to the mouth 

 of another wide and low canon, whose lofty outer 

 cliffs, facing the fiord, are telling glacial advertise- 

 ments. Gladly I should have explored it all, traced its 

 streams of water and streams of ice, and entered its 

 highest chambers, the homes and fountains of the 

 snow. But I had to wait. I only stopped an hour or 



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