Travels in Alaska 



shape they are destined to take when in the fullness 

 of time they shall be parts of new landscapes. 



Ere I lost sight of the east-side mountains, those 

 on the west came in sight, so that holding my course 

 was easy, and, though making haste, I halted for a 

 moment to gaze down into the beautiful pure blue 

 crevasses and to drink at the lovely blue wells, the 

 most beautiful of all Nature's water-basins, or at the 

 rills and streams outspread over the ice-land prairie, 

 never ceasing to admire their lovely color and music 

 as they glided and swirled in their blue crystal chan- 

 nels and potholes, and the rumbling of the moulins, or 

 mills, where streams poured into blue-walled pits of 

 unknown depth, some of them as regularly circular 

 as if bored with augers. Interesting, too, were the 

 .cascades over blue cliffs, where streams fell into 

 .crevasses or slid almost noiselessly down slopes so 

 smooth and frictionless their motion was concealed. 

 The round or oval wells, however, from one to ten 

 feet wide, and from one to twenty or thirty feet deep, 

 were perhaps the most beautiful of all, the water so 

 pure as to be almost invisible. My widest views did 

 not probably exceed fifteen miles, the rain and mist 

 making distances seem greater. 



On reaching the farther shore and tracing it a few 

 miles to northward, I found a large portion of the 

 glacier-current sweeping out westward in a bold and 

 beautiful curve around the shoulder of a mountain 

 as if going direct to the open sea. Leaving the main 

 trunk, it breaks into a magnificent uproar of pin- 

 nacles and spires and up-heaving, splashing wave- 



I 250 ] 



