MOUNT RAINIER 



of old crystalline ice develop in places, more especially 

 toward the glacier's lower margin. Day by day these 

 patches expand until, by the end of August, most of 

 the lower ice field has been stripped of its brilliant 

 mantle. Its countenance, once bright and serene, now 

 assumes a grim expression and becomes crisscrossed by 

 a thousand seams, like the visage of an aged man. 



Over this roughened surface trickle countless tiny 

 rills which, uniting, form swift rivulets and torrents, 

 indeed veritable river systems on a miniature scale 

 that testify with eloquence to the rapidity with which 

 the sun consumes the snow. Strangely capricious in 

 course are these streamlets, for, while in the main 

 gravitating with the glacier's slope, they are ever likely 

 to be caught and deflected by the numerous seams in 

 the ice. These seams, it should be explained, are lines 

 of former crevasses that have healed again under pres- 

 sure in the course of the glacier's slow descent. As a 

 rule they inclose a small amount of dirt, and owing 

 to its presence are particularly vulnerable to erosion. 

 Along them the streamlets rapidly intrench themselves 

 - perhaps by virtue of their warmth, what little there 

 is of it, as much as by actual abrasion and hollow 

 out channels of a freakish sort, here straight and 

 canal-like, there making sharp zigzag turns ; again 

 broadening into profound, canoe-shaped pools, or 

 emptying into deeper trenches by little sparkling cata- 

 racts, or passing under tiny bridges and tunnels a 

 veritable toy land carved in ice. 



But unfortunately these pretty features are ephem- 

 eral, many of them changing from day to day ; for, 

 evenings, as the lowering sun withdraws its heat, 

 the melting gradually comes to a halt, and the little 

 streams cease to flow. The soft babbling and gurgling 

 and the often exquisitely melodious tinkle of dripping 

 water in hidden glacial wells are hushed, and the silent 

 frost proceeds to choke up passages and channels, so 

 that next day's waters have to seek new avenues. 



