FAR AND NEAR 



and as if about to topple over upon them ; but it did 

 not. To the eye it was as fixed as the rocks ; appar- 

 ently one could have leaned his back against the ice 

 with his feet upon the foliage. The channel of Port 

 Wells w^as so blocked with ice from the incessant 

 discharges of the glaciers that the ship made her 

 way with great difficulty, and was finally compelled 

 to anchor more than twenty miles from the head. 

 In the launches we managed to get about ten miles 

 nearer. This was the most active glacier we had 

 seen. The thundering of the great ice Niagara there 

 in the distance was in our ears every moment, but 

 we could not get near it; it beat us off with its ice 

 avalanches. Such piles of gravel and broken rocks 

 as I climbed and tried to cross that day at the foot 

 of one of the lesser side glaciers dwarfed anything 

 I had yet seen. They suggested the crush of moun- 

 tains and the wreck of continents. 



Two things constantly baffle and mislead the eye 

 in all these Alaskan waters — size and distance. 

 Things are on a new scale. The standard one brings 

 with him will not hold. The eye says it is three 

 miles to such a point, it turns out to be six ; or that 

 the front of yonder glacier is a hundred feet high^ 

 and it is two hundred or more. For my part, I 

 never succeeded in bringing my eye up to the 

 Alaskan scale. Many a point, many a height, which 

 I marked for my own from the deck of the ship, 

 seemed to recede from me when I turned my steps 



74 



