Travels in Alaska 



ice wall, and the snow-laden mountains beyond. Still 

 more impotent are words in telling the peculiar awe 

 one experiences in entering these mansions of the icy 

 North, notwithstanding it is only the natural effect 

 of appreciable manifestations of the presence of God. 



Standing in the gateway of this glorious temple, 

 and regarding it only as a picture, its outlines may be 

 easily traced, the water foreground of a pale-green 

 color, a smooth mirror sheet sweeping back five or 

 six miles like one of the lower reaches of a great river, 

 bounded at the head by a beveled barrier wall of blue- 

 ish-white ice four or five hundred feet high. A few 

 snowy mountain-tops appear beyond it, and on either 

 hand rise a series of majestic, pale-gray granite rocks 

 from three to four thousand feet high, some of them 

 thinly forested and striped with bushes and flowery 

 grass on narrow shelves, especially about half way 

 up, others severely sheer and bare and built together 

 into walls like those of Yosemite, extending far be- 

 yond the ice barrier, one immense brow appearing 

 beyond another with their bases buried in the glacier. 

 This is a Yosemite Valley in process of formation, the 

 modeling and sculpture of the walls nearly completed 

 and well planted, but no groves as yet or gardens or 

 meadows on the raw and unfinished bottom. It is as 

 if the explorer, in entering the Merced Yosemite, 

 should find the walls nearly in their present condition, 

 trees and flowers in the warm nooks and along the 

 sunny portions of the moraine-covered brows, but 

 the bottom of the valley still covered with water and 

 beds of gravel and mud, and the grand glacier that 



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