RUSSELL FIORD 



57 



clinging to the steep sides of the mountain or breaking 

 over its cliffs and yet falling not, hanging there like a con- 

 gealed torrent, a silent and motionless shadow. The eye 

 seems baffled. Surely it is plunging or will plunge the 

 next second; but no, there it is fixed; it bends over the 

 brink, it foams below, but no sound is heard and no move- 

 ment is apparent. You see the corrugated surface where 

 it emerges from its great snow reservoir on the mountain 

 summit; it shows deep crevasses where it sweeps down a 

 steep incline, then curves across a terrace, then leaps in 

 solid fixed foam down the face of the cliff, to which it 

 seems bound as by some magic. 



These precipice glaciers apparently move no faster 

 than those 

 in the val- 

 ley. It is in 

 all cases a 

 subtle invis- 

 ible move- 

 ment like 

 that of the 

 astronomic 

 bodies. It 



would seem as if gravity had little to do with it. They do 

 not gain momentum like an avalanche of snow or earth but 

 creep so slowly that to the looker-on they are as motion- 

 less as the rocks themselves. The grade, the obstacles in 

 the way, seem to make no difference. One would think 

 that if a mass of ice, weighing many thousand tons, hang- 

 ing upon the face of a mountain wall steeper than a house 

 roof, detached itself from the rest at all and began to 

 move, it would gain momentum and presently shoot 

 down, as the loosened ice and snow do from our slate 

 roofs. But it does not. If the temperature of the rocks 

 were suddenly raised as in the case of the roof, no doubt 



SHIP AT EDGE OF DRIFT ICE, YAKUTAT BAY. 



