From Taku River to "Taylor Bay 



shaped masses, a crystal cataract incomparably 

 greater and wilder than a score of Niagaras. 



Tracing its channel three or four miles, I found 

 that it fell into a lake, which it fills with bergs. The 

 front of this branch of the glacier is about three miles 

 wide. I first took the lake to be the head of an arm of 

 the sea, but, going down to its shore and tasting it, I 

 found it fresh, and by my aneroid perhaps less than 

 a hundred feet above sea-level. It is probably sepa- 

 rated from the sea only by a moraine dam. I had not 

 time to go around its shores, as it was now near five 

 o'clock and I was about fifteen miles from camp, and 

 I had to make haste to recross the glacier before dark, 

 which would come on about eight o'clock. I there- 

 fore made haste up to the main glacier, and, shaping 

 my course by compass and the structure lines of the 

 ice, set off from the land out on to the grand crystal 

 prairie again. All was so silent and so concentred, 

 owing to the low dragging mist, the beauty close 

 about me was all the more keenly felt, though tinged 

 with a dim sense of danger, as if coming events were 

 casting shadows. I was soon out of sight of land, and 

 the evening dusk that on cloudy days precedes the 

 real night gloom came stealing on and only ice was in 

 sight, and the only sounds, save the low rumbling of 

 the mills and the rattle of falling stones at long in- 

 tervals, were the low, terribly earnest meanings of the 

 wind or distant waterfalls coming through the thick- 

 ening gloom. After two hours of hard work I came 

 to a maze of crevasses of appalling depth and width 

 which could not be passed apparently either up or 



[251 1 



