36 JOHN BURROUGHS 



up from beneath it. Could we have been here many cen- 

 turies ago, we should have seen, much further down the 

 valley, a palisade of ice two or three thousand feet high. 

 Many of these Alaska glaciers are rapidly melting and 

 are now but the fragments of their former selves. From 

 observations made here twenty years ago by John Muir, 

 it is known that the position of the front of Muir Glacier 

 at that time was about two miles below its present posi- 

 tion, which would indicate a rate of recession of about one 

 mile in ten years. 



What we saw on that June afternoon was a broken and 

 crumbling wall of ice 250 feet high in our front, stretch- 

 ing across the inlet and running down to a low dirty 

 crumbling line where it ended on the shore on our left, 

 and where it disappeared behind high gray gravelly banks 

 on our right. The inlet near the glacier was choked with 

 icebergs. 



What is that roar or explosion that salutes our ears 

 before our anchor has found bottom ? It is the downpour 

 of an enormous mass of ice from the glacier's front, 

 making it for the moment as active as Niagara. Other 

 and still other downpours follow at intervals of a few 

 minutes, with deep explosive sounds and the rising up 

 of great clouds of spray, and we quickly realized that 

 here is indeed a new kind of Niagara, a cataract the 

 like of which we have not before seen, a mighty con- 

 gealed river that discharges into the bay intermittently in 

 ice avalanches that shoot down its own precipitous front. 

 The mass of ice below the water line is vastly greater 

 than that above, and when the upper portions fall away 

 enormous bergs are liberated and rise up from the bottom. 

 They rise slowly and majestically, like huge monsters of 

 the deep, lifting themselves up to a height of fifty or a 

 hundred feet, the water pouring off them in white sheets, 

 then subsiding again and floating away with a huge wave 



