116 /. C. Russell — Expedition to Mount St. Elias. 



Let us not look too far ahead, however. Wandering on over 

 the sunny slopes, where the gardener has forgotten to separate 

 the colors or to divide the flower banks, we gain the top of the 

 island ; but. so dense are the plants about us, and so eager is each 

 painted cup to expand freely in the sunlight at the expense of 

 its neighbors, that we have to beat them down with our alpen- 

 stocks — much as we dislike to mar the beauty of the place — 

 before we can recline on the thick turf beneath and study the 

 strange landscape before us. 



The foreground of every view is a bank of flowers nodding and 

 swaying in the wind, but all beyond is a frozen desert. The 

 ice-fields before us, with their dark bands of debris, are a picture 

 of desolation. The creative breath has touched only the garden 

 which we, the first of wanderers, have invaded. The land before 

 us is entirely Avithout human associations. No battles have 

 there been fought, no kings have ruled, no poets have sung of its 

 ruggedness, and no philosopher has explained its secrets. Yet 

 it has its history, its poetry, and its philosophy ! 



The mountains toward the north are too near at hand to reveal 

 their grandeur ; only the borders of the vast snow-fields cover- 

 ing all of these upper slopes are in view. In the deep canon 

 with perj)endicular walls, just north' of our station, but curving 

 westward so that its upper course is concealed from view, there 

 flows a secondary glacier which forces its terminal moraine high 

 up on the northern slope of Blossom island, but does not now 

 join the ice-field on the south. Streams of turbid water flow 

 from this glacier on each side of the oasis on which we stand 

 and unite at the mouth of a dark tunnel in the ice toward the 

 south. 



The barren gravel plain just east of our station, and at the 

 foot of the glacier from the north, is the bed of a glacial lake 

 which has been drained through the tunnel in the ice. On our 

 way to Blossom island we crossed this area and found that it 

 had but recently lost its waters. Miniature terraces on the 

 gravel banks forming the sides of the basin marked the height 

 to which the waters last rose, and all the slopes formerly sub- 

 merged were covered with a thin layer of sediment. On the 

 sides of the basin where this fi'esh lining rests on steep slopes 

 there are beautiful frettings made by rills in the soft sediment. 

 The stream from the glacier now meanders across this sand plain, 

 dividing as it goes into many branches, which unite on approach- 



