7o 



JOHN BURROUGHS 



Wells, Amherst. On going ashore we had a chance to 

 view, in profile, those pouring down from the heights, 

 and the effect was novel and strange. We looked along 

 the green, tender enfoliaged side of the mountain and 

 saw one of these torrents of shattered ice rising up fifty 

 or more feet above its banks and as if about to topple 



COLLEGE FIORD : BRYN MAWR GLACIER ON LEFT ; HARVARD GLACIER 



IN DISTANCE. 



over upon them; but it did not; to the eye it was as fixed 

 as the rocks; apparently one could have leaned his back 

 against the ice with his feet upon the foliage. The chan- 

 nel of Port Wells was so blocked with ice from the inces- 

 sant discharges of the glaciers that the ship made her way 

 with great difficulty and was finally compelled to anchor 

 more than twenty miles from the head. In the launches 

 we managed to get about ten miles nearer. Here was 

 the most active glacier we had seen. The thundering of 

 the great ice Niagara there in the distance was in our 

 ears every moment; but we could not get near it; it 

 beat us off with its ice avalanches. Such piles of gravel 

 and broken rocks as I climbed and tried to cross that day 

 at the foot of one of the lesser side glaciers dwarfed any- 

 thing I had yet seen. They suggested the crush of moun- 

 tains and the wreck of continents. 



