CHAPTER IV 

 GLACIERS 



PEOPLE who have not seen a glacier, walked on a 

 glacier, chipped into it with an ice-axe, and followed 

 it up from its melting " snout " and decidedly dirty, rock- 

 strewn lower end to the regions where it is pure and 

 white, split into yawning chasms and raised into great 

 teeth or pinnacles — those, indeed, who have not followed 

 it yet further from these middle heights, far on up the 

 rocky sides of a great mountain, until the region is 

 reached where it ceases to be ice, and becomes a mass of 

 soft, powdery snow — do not know one of the most 

 curious, unimaginable, and powerful agencies in Nature. 

 We inhabitants of the British Isles, were we confined to 

 our limited territory, and un-informed by travellers as to 

 the wonders of the snow-world, would never guess or 

 infer from anything we ever see here that such things as 

 glaciers exist. There is no parallel to the peculiarity, the 

 unexpected and astonishing quality, of a glacier. > Even 

 a volcano is not so remote from what one could have 

 expected. Rivers, lakes, and seas we know, and we can 

 imagine them bigger and deeper. Waterfalls and great 

 white clouds, in fact all the forms of water, are familiar to 

 us. Mountains, even winter snow-capped mountains, we 

 sometimes see in our own island, and can imagine them 

 bigger. We have handled ice and ^now, too. Yet 

 nothing which we know by experience here prepares us 



