IN THE WORKSHOP OF THE GODS 



43 



toppled over, a great fragment of rock hung on the very 

 edge, ready to be deposited upon the ridge, windrows of 

 soil and gravel and boulders were clinging to the margin 

 of the ice, but while I stayed not a pebble moved, all was 

 silence and inertia. And I could look down between the 

 glacier and the polished mountain side; they were not in 

 contact; the hand of the sculptor was raised as it were, 

 but he did not strike while I was around; in front of 

 me upon the glacier for many miles was a perfect wilder- 

 ness of crevasses, the ice was ridged and contorted like 

 an angry sea, but not a sound, not a movement anywhere. 



CREVASSES ON MUIR GLACIER. 



Go out on the eastern rim of the glacier where for a 

 dozen miles or more one walks upon a nearly level plain 

 of ice, and if one did not know to the contrary, he would 

 be sure he saw the agency of man all about him. It is so 

 rare to find nature working with such measure and pre- 

 cision. Here, for instance, is a railroad embankment 

 stretching off across this ice prairie — a line of soil, gravel 

 and boulders, as uniform in width and thickness as if every 

 inch of it had been carefully measured — straight, level, 

 three feet high and about the width of a single-track road. 

 The eye follows it till it fades away in the distance. 

 Parallel with it a few yards away is another line of soil 

 and gravel more suggestive of a wagon road, only with 

 what marvelous evenness is the material distributed: it 



