Travels in Alaska 



"It is welded by the pressure of its own weight." 



"Are these white masses we see in the hollows 

 glaciers also?" 



"Yes." 



"Are those bluish draggled masses hanging down 

 from beneath the snow-fields what you call the snouts 

 of the glaciers?" 



"Yes." 



"What made the hollows they are in?" 



"The glaciers themselves, just as traveling animals 

 make their own tracks." 



"How long have they been there?" 



"Numberless centuries," etc. I answered as best I 

 could, keeping up a running commentary on the sub- 

 ject in general, while busily engaged in sketching and 

 noting my own observations, preaching glacial gos- 

 pel in a rambling way, while the Cassiar, slowly 

 wheezing and creeping along the shore, shifted our 

 position so that the icy canons were opened to view 

 and closed again in regular succession, like the leaves 

 of a book. 



About the middle of the afternoon we were di- 

 rectly opposite a noble group of glaciers some ten in 

 number, flowing from a chain of crater-like snow 

 fountains, guarded around their summits and well 

 down their sides by jagged peaks and cols and curving 

 mural ridges. From each of the larger clusters of 

 fountains, a wide, sheer-walled canon opens down to 

 the sea. Three of the trunk glaciers descend to within 

 a few feet of the sea-level. The largest of the three, 

 probably about fifteen miles long, terminates in a 



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