FAR AND NEAR 



What we saw on that June afternoon was a broken 

 and crumbling wall of ice two hundred and fifty 

 feet high in our front, stretching across the inlet 

 and running down to a low, dirty, crumbling line 

 where it ended on the shore on our left, and where 

 it disappeared behind high gray gravelly banks on 

 our right. The inlet near the glacier was choked 

 with icebergs. 



What is that roar or explosion that salutes our ears 

 before our anchor has found bottom ? It is the down- 

 pour of an enormous mass of ice from the gla- 

 cier's front, making it for the moment as active as 

 Niagara. Other and still other downpours follow 

 at intervals of a few minutes, with deep explosive 

 sounds and the rising up of great clouds of spray, 

 and we quickly reahze that here is indeed a new 

 kind of Niagara, a cataract the like of which we 

 have not before seen, a mighty congealed river that 

 discharges into the bay intermittently in ice ava- 

 lanches that shoot down its own precipitous front 

 The mass of ice below the water line is vastly 

 greater than that above, and when the upper por- 

 tions fall away, enormous bergs are liberated and 

 rise up from the bottom. They rise slowly and 

 majestically, like huge monsters of the deep, lifting 

 themselves up to a height of fifty or a hundred feet, 

 the water pouring off them in white sheets. Then 

 they subside again and float away with a huge wave 

 in front. Nothing we had read or heard had pre- 



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