FAR AND NEAR 



feet, which the rains and melting snows have plowed 

 and ribbed and carved into many fantastic forms. 

 There was an air of seclusion and remoteness about 

 it all, as if this had been a special playground of the 

 early ice gods, a nook or alley set apart for them in 

 which to indulge every whim and fancy. And what 

 could be more whimsical or fantastic than yonder 

 glacier playing the mountain goat, clinging to the 

 steep sides of the mountain or breaking over its 

 cliffs and yet falling not, hanging there Hke a con^ 

 gealed torrent, a silent and motionless shadow. The 

 eye seems baffled. Surely the ice is plunging or will 

 plunge the next second: but no, there it is fixed; it 

 bends over the brink, it foams below, but no sound 

 is heard and no movement is apparent. You see the 

 corrugated surface where it emerges from its great 

 snow reservoir on the mountain summit; it shows 

 deep crevasses where it sweeps down a steep incline, 

 then curves across a terrace, then leaps in solid, 

 fixed foam down the face of the clifi, to which it 

 seems bound as by some magic. 



These precipice glaciers apparently move no faster 

 than those in the valley. It is in all cases a subtle, 

 invisible movement, like that of the astronomic 

 bodies. It would seem as if gravity had little to do 

 with it. They do not gain momentum like an ava- 

 lanche of snow or earth, but creep so slowly that to 

 the lookers-on they are as motionless as the rocks 

 themselves. The grade, the obstacles in the way, 



CO 



