434 TYNDALL GLACIER. 



at length the slope pierced the very clouds, and, re- 

 appearing above the curling vapors, was lost in the 

 blue canopy of the heavens. 



Three glaciers were visible from my point of ob- 

 servation, — a small one, to the right, barely touching 

 the water, and hanging, as if in suspensive agony, in a 

 steep declivity ; another, at the head of the bay, was 

 yet miles away from the sea ; while before us, in the 

 centre of the bay, there came pouring down the 

 rough and broken flood of ice before alluded to, 

 which, bulging far out into the bay, formed a coast- 

 line of ice over two miles long. 



The whole glacier system of Greenland was here 

 spread out before me in miniature. A lofty mountain- 

 ridge, like a whale's back, held in check the expanding 

 mer de glace, but a broad cleft cut it in twain, and the 

 stream before me had burst through the opening like 

 cataract rapids tumbling from the pent-up waters of a 

 lake. The sublimity and picturesqueness of the scene 

 was greatly heightened by two parallel rocky ridges, 

 whose crests were to the left of the glacier. These 

 crests are trap-dykes, left standing fifty feet perhaps 

 above the sloping hill-side below them, by the wasting 

 away of the sandstone through which they have 

 forced their way in some great convulsion of Nature. 



On the day following, I visited this glacier and 

 made a careful examination of it, pulling first along 

 its front in a boat and then mounting to its surface. 



It would be difficult to imagine any thing more 

 startling to the imagination or more suggestive to 

 the mind than the scene presented by this two miles 

 of ice coast-line, as I rowed along within a few fathoms 

 of it. The glacier was broken up into the most sin- 

 gular shapes, and presented nothing of that uniformity 



