FAR AND NEAR 



affords can be found on the continent. It has a cu- 

 rious fascination. Impending .ataclysms are in its 

 look. In a moment or two one knows some part of 

 it will topple or slide into the sea. One afternoon 

 during our stay about half a mile of the front fell at 

 once. The swell which it caused brouo;ht jrrief to our 

 photographers who had ventured too near it. Their 

 boat was filled and their plates were destroyed. The 

 downfall from the front is usually a torrent of shat- 

 tered ice which pours down, simulating water, but 

 at longer intervals enormous solid masses like rocks, 

 topple and plunge. It is then that the great blue 

 bergs rise up from below — born of the depths. 

 The enormous pressure to which their particles 

 have been subjected for many centuries seems to 

 have intensified their color. They have a pristine, 

 elemental look. Their crystals have not seen the 

 light since they fell in snowflakes back amid the 

 mountains generations ago. All this time impris- 

 oned, traveling in darkness, carving the valleys, 

 polishing the rocks, under a weight as of mountains, 

 till at last their deliverance comes with crash and 

 roar, and they are once more free to career in the air 

 and light as dew or rain or cloud, and then again 

 to be drawn into that cycle of transformation and 

 caught and bound once more in glacier chains for 

 another century. 



We lingered by the Muir and in adjacent waters 

 five or six days, sending out botanical, zoological, 



42 



