HARMONIES. 



some places magnificent glaciers extend from the 

 mountain-side to the water's edge. "It is scarcely 

 possible to imagine anything more beautiful than 

 the beryl-like blue of these glaciers, and especially 

 as contrasted with the dead-white of the upper 

 expanse of snow." Heavy and sudden squalls 

 come down from the ravines, raising the sea, and 

 covering it with foam, like a dark plain studded 

 with patches of drifted snow, which the furious 

 wind is ever lifting in sheets of driving spray. 

 The albatross with its wide-spread wings comes 

 careering up the Channel against the wind, and 

 screams as if it were the spirit of the storm. The 

 surf breaks fearfully against the narrow shores, 

 and mounts to an immense height against the 

 rocks. Yonder is a promontory of blue ice, the 

 sheer end of a glacier ; the wind and sea are telling 

 upon it, and now down plunges a huge mass, 

 which breaking into fragments, bespreads the 

 angry sea with mimic icebergs. 



In the midst of this war of the elements, ap- 

 pear a pair of sperm-whales. They swim within 

 stone's-cast of the shore, spouting at intervals, 

 and jumping in their unwieldy mirth clean out of 

 the waters, falling back on their huge sides, and 

 splashing the sea high on every hand, with a 

 sound like the reverberation of a distant broad- 

 side.* How appropriate a place for these giants 

 of the deep to appear I and how immensely must 

 their presence have enhanced the wild grandeur of 

 that romantic scene I 



We turn from this inhospitable strait to a region 

 if possible even more forbidding, more stern, more 

 grandly awful ; one of the passes of the mighty 

 Andes, the Cordilleras of Peru. 



"We now came," says a traveller, "to the Jaula, 



* Darwin's " Voyage," chap. x. 

 58 



