42 JOHN BURROUGHS 



We were in the midst of strange scenes, hard to ren- 

 der in words, the miles upon miles of moraines upon 

 either hand, gray, loosely piled, scooped, plowed, chan- 

 neled, sifted, from 50 to 200 feet high; the sparkling sea 

 water dotted with blue bergs and loose drift ice, the 

 towering masses of almost naked rock, smoothed, carved, 

 rounded, granite-ribbed and snow-crowned that looked 

 down upon us from both sides of the inlet, and the cleft, 

 toppling, staggering front of the great glacier in its 

 terrible labor throes stretching before us from shore to 

 shore. 



We saw the world-shaping forces at work; we 

 scrambled over plains they had built but yesterday. We 

 saw them transport enormous rocks, and tons on tons of 

 soil and debris from the distant mountains; we saw the 

 remains of extensive forests they had engulfed probably 

 within the century, and were now uncovering again; we 

 saw their turbid rushing streams loaded with newly ground 

 rocks and soil-making material; we saw the beginnings of 

 vegetation in the tracks of the retreating glacier; our 

 dredgers brought up the first forms of sea life along the 

 shore; we witnessed the formation of the low mounds and 

 ridges and bowl-shaped depressions that so often diversify 

 our landscapes — all the while with the muffled thunder of 

 the falling bergs in our ears. 



We were really in one of the workshops and labora- 

 tories of the elder gods, but only in the glacier's front was 

 there present evidence that they were still at work. I 

 wanted to see them opening crevasses in the ice, dropping 

 the soil and rocks they had transported, polishing the 

 mountains, or blocking the streams, but I could not. They 

 seemed to knock off work when we were watching them. 

 One day I climbed up to the shoulder of a huge granite 

 ridge on the west, against which the glacier pressed and 

 over which it broke. Huge masses of ice had recently 



