ENORMOUS GLACIER. 135 



ward face of thirty or thirty-two English miles, and 

 protrudes in three great sweeping arcs for at least 

 five miles beyond the coast line. It has a precip- 

 itous and inaccessible cliff of ice all along its face, 

 varying from twenty to one hundred feet in height ; 

 pieces from the size of a church downward are con- 

 stantly becoming detached from this icy precipice, 

 and tumble into the sea with a terrific roar and 

 splash, and of course render it highly dangerous to 

 go near the base in a boat. The surrounding sea 

 is always filled with these fragments of all sizes 

 and shapes, and many of them I have observed car- 

 rying large quantities of clay and stones imbedded 

 in them. 



This great glacier is in three divisions. The 

 northern and southern divisions are each quite 

 smooth and glassy, but the piece in the centre is 

 broken up, and rough, and jagged to a degree that 

 is perfectly indescribable ; at a little distance it ex- 

 actly resembles a great forest of pine-trees thickly 

 covered with snow. 



This part of the glacier must have undergone 

 some great disturbance, arising either from its slid- 

 ing over a rocky bed, or from its being forced through 

 a narrow ravine in the underlying hills. Whatever 

 the disturbing cause may be, it is actively at work 

 still, because we frequently saw enormous slices of 

 the smooth division split up and cave in toward 

 the disrupted part ; and there is a constant succes- 

 sion of tremendous booming reports, exactly resem- 



