Ella Higginson

“ Up and down the water-ways slid the bidarkas noiselessly; and along the shores the brown women moved among the willows and sedges, or stood motionless, staring out at their white sisters on the stranded boat. There were times when every one of the millions of sedges on island and shore seemed to flash out alone and apart, like a dazzling emerald lance quivering to strike.
They are dull of soul and dull of imagination who complain of monotony on the Yukon Flats. There is beauty for all that have eyes wherewith to see. It is the beauty of the desert ”

“ No one can even tread the deck of a Yukon steamer and be quite so small and narrow again as he was before. The loneliness, the mystery, the majesty of it, reveals his own soul to his shrinking eyes, and he grows—in a day, in an hour, in the flash of a thought—out of his old self. If only to be borne through this great country on this wide water-way to the sea can work this change in a man's heart, what miracle might not be wrought by a few years of life in its solitude? ”

“ Champagne is a part of the hospitality of Alaska. The cheapest is seven dollars and a half a bottle, and Alaskans seldom buy the cheapest of anything.
It was on a soft gray afternoon that the Dora entered Karluk Bay between the two picturesque promontories that plunge boldly out into Shelikoff Straits. It seemed as though all the sea-birds of the world must be gathered there. Our entrance set them afloat from their perches on the rocky cliffs. They filled the air, from shore to shore, like a snow-storm. Their poetic flight and shrill, mournful plaining haunt every memory of Karluk Bay. ”

“ No steamer could have a twelve-hundred-mile route more fascinating than the one from Valdez to Unalaska. It is intensely lovely. Behind the gray cliffs of the peninsula float the snow-peaks of the Aleutian Range. Here and there a volcano winds its own dark, fleecy turban round its crest, or flings out a scarlet scarf of flame. There are glaciers sweeping everything before them; bold headlands plunging out into the sea, where they pause with a sheer drop of thousands of feet; and flowery vales and dells. There are countless islands—some of them mere bits of green floating upon the blue. ”

“ When the steamer has whistled for the sixth time to call in the wandering passengers, and the captain is on the bridge; when the last squaw has pigeon-toed herself up the gangway, flirting her gay shawl around her and chuckling and clucking over the gullibility of the innocent white people; when the last strain from the phonograph in the big store on the hill has died across the violet water widening between the shore and the withdrawing ship—the spendthrift passenger retires to his cabin and finds the berths overflowing and smelling to heaven with Indian things. ”

“ It is fifty-four miles from this cape to the East Cape of Siberia, and like stepping-stones between lie Fairway Rock and the Diomedes. Beyond is the Frozen Ocean. These islands are of almost solid stone. They are snow-swept, ice-bound, and ice-bounded for eight months of every year. But ah, the auroral magnificence that at times must stream through the gates of frozen pearl which swing open and shut to the Arctic Sea! What moonlights must glitter there like millions of diamonds; what sunrises and sunsets must burn like opaline mist! How large the stars must be—and how bright and low! ”

“ Poor Whidbey felt the earth shake at a distance of three miles from the falling ice.
In ordinary light, the front of the glacier is beautifully blue. It is a blue that is never seen in anything save a glacier or a floating iceberg—a pale, pale blue that seems to flash out fire with every movement. At sunset, its beauty holds one spellbound. It sweeps down magnificently from the snow peaks which form its fit setting and pushes out into the sea in a solid wall of spired and pinnacled opal which, ever and anon breaking off, flings over it clouds of color which dazzle the eyes. ”

“ It is mine. I own it as surely as I own the green hill upon which I live, the blue sea that sparkles daily beneath my windows, the gold-brilliant constellations that move nightly above my home, or the song that the meadow-lark sings to his mate in the April dawn.
The sea breaks into surf upon Shishaldin's base, and snow covers the slender cone from summit to sea level, save for a month or two in summer when it melts around the base. Owing to the mists, it is almost impossible to obtain a sharp negative of Shishaldin from the water. ”

“ The finest scenery on the regular steamer route, until the great snow fields and glaciers are reached, is considered by many well acquainted with the route, to lie from Millbank on to Dixon Entrance. The days are not long enough now for all the beauty that weighs upon the senses like caresses. At evening, the sunset, blooming like a rose upon these splendid reaches, seems to drop perfumed petals of color, until the still air is pink with them, and the steamer pushes them aside as it glides through with faint throbbings that one feels rather than hears. ”

“ There those saintly beings spend their lives in God's service. Nothing save a divine faith could sustain a delicate woman to endure such ceaseless torment for three months in every year; and yet, like the lone woman at Nation, their faces tell us that we, rather than they, are for pity. The stars upon their brows are the white and blessed stars of peace.
The steamer lands at neither Russian Mission nor Andreaofsky; but at both may be seen, on grassy slopes, beautiful Greek churches, with green, pale blue, and yellow roofs, domes and bell-towers, chimes and glittering crosses. ”

“ It is daylight all the time, and no one should sleep between White Horse and Dawson. Not an hour of this beautiful voyage on the Upper Yukon should be wasted.
The banks are high and bold, for the most part springing sheer out of the water in columns and pinnacles of solid stone. There are also forestated slopes rising to peaks of snow; and the same kind of clay cliffs that we saw at White Horse, white and shining in the bluish light of morning, but more beautiful still in the mysterious rosy shadows of midnight. ”

“ The winds were but the softest zephyrs, touching the face and hair like rose petals, or other delicate, visible things; and, the air was fragrant with things that grow day and night and that fling their splendor forth in one riotous rush of bloom. Shaken through and through their perfume was that thrilling, indescribable sweetness which abides in vast spaces where snow mountains glimmer and the opaline palisades of glaciers shine. [Pg 338]
It is a view to quicken the blood, and to inspire an American to give silent thanks to God that this rich and peerlessly beautiful country is ours. ”

“ The view from the summit of Sour-Dough Hill is unsurpassed in the interior of Alaska. Glacial creeks and roaring rivers; wild and fantastic canyons; moving glaciers; gorges of royal purple gloom; green valleys and flowery slopes; the domed and towered Castle [Pg 286] Mountains; the lone and majestic peaks pushing up above all others, above the clouds, cascades spraying down sheer precipices; and far to the south the linked peaks of the Coast Range piled magnificently upon the sky, dim and faintly blue in the great distance,—all blend into one grand panorama of unrivalled inland grandeur. ”

“ The setting of the glaciers of Lynn Canal is superb. The canal itself, named by Vancouver for his home in England, is the most majestic slender water-way in Alaska. From Puget Sound, fiord after fiord leads one on in ever increasing, ever changing splendor, until the grand climax is reached in Lynn Canal.
For fifty-five miles the sparkling blue waters of the canal push almost northward. Its shores are practically unbroken by inlets, and rise in noble sweeps or stately palisades, to domes and peaks of snow. Glaciers may be seen at every turn of the steamer. ”

“ No, I don't know what it is, but I do know how it is; and so does every other poor devil that ever heard that something calling him that's just Alaska. It wakes you up in the middle of the night, just as plain as if somebody had said your name out loud, and you just lay there the rest of the night aching to go. I tell you what, if ever a country had a spirit, it's Alaska; and when it once gets hold of you and gets to calling you to come, you might just as well get up and start, for it calls you and follows you, and haunts you till you do. ”

“ The Aleutian Islands drift out, one after another, toward the coast of Asia, like an emerald rosary on the blue breast of Behring Sea. The only tree in the Aleutian Islands is a stunted evergreen growing at the gate of a residence in Unalaska, on the island of the same name.
The prevailing atmospheric color of Alaska is a kind of misty, rosy lavender, enchantingly blended from different shades of violet, rose, silver, azure, gold, and green. The water coloring changes hourly. One passes from a narrow channel whose waters are of the most delicate green into a wider reach of the palest blue ”

“ The color reminded me of the dull old-rose of Columbia Glacier.
Lake Bennett dashes its foam-crested blue waves along the pebbly beaches and stone terraces for a distance of twenty-seven miles. At its widest it is not more than two miles, and it narrows in places to less than half a mile. It winds and curves like a river.
The railway runs along the eastern shore of the lake, and mountains slope abruptly from the opposite shore to a height of five thousand feet. The scenery is never monotonous. It charms constantly, and the air keeps the traveller as fresh and sparkling in spirit as champagne. ”

“ Upon their return to Kadiak and their favorable report of their lone, beautiful, and sea-surrounded retreat, a vessel was despatched in search of it, but without success.
To this day it is "Lost" Island. Many have looked for it, but in vain. It is the sailor's dream, and is supposed to be rich in treasure. Its streams are yellow with gold, its mountains green with copper glance; ambergris floats on the waters surrounding it; and all the seals and sea-otters that have been frightened out of the north sun themselves, unmolested, upon its rocks and its floating strands of kelp. ”

“ From Sitka to Unalaska, and up the Yukon so far as the Russian influence goes, his name is still murmured with a veneration that is almost adoration.
Historians know him and praise him, without a dissenting voice, as Father Veniaminoff; for it was under this simple and unassuming title that the pure, earnest, and devout young Russian came to the colonies in 1823, carrying the high, white light of his faith to the wretched natives, among whom his life work was to be, from that time on, almost to the end.
No man has ever done as much for the natives of Alaska as he, not even Mr. Duncan. ”

“ They are wrought of fire and stone and snow by the tireless hand that has worked through centuries unnumbered and unknown.
He that would fall under the spell of Alaska, will sail on "to Westward," on to Unalaska; or he will go Northward and drift down the Yukon—that splendid, lonely river that has its birth within a few miles of the sea, yet flows twenty-three hundred miles to find it.
Alaskan steamers usually sail between eight o'clock in the evening and midnight, and throngs of people congregate upon the piers of Seattle to watch their departure. ”

“ For the sea lover, it is enough only to stand in the bow of a steamer headed for Alaska and hear the kiss and the rippling murmur of the waves as they break apart when the sharp cut-water pierces them, and then their long, musical rush along the steamer's sides, ere they reunite in one broad wake of bowing silver that leads across the purple toward home. ”

“ The vegetation is all of tropical luxuriance, and, owing to its constant dew and mist baths, it is of an intense and vivid green that is fairly dazzling where the sun touches it. One of the chief charms of the wooded reserve is its stillness—broken only by the musical rush of waters and the lyrical notes of birds. A kind of lavender twilight abides beneath the trees, and, with the narrow, spruce-aisled vistas that open at every turn, gives one a sensation as of being in some dim and scented cathedral. ”

“ After Tanana, this is the loveliest place on the Yukon. Its sparkling, emerald beauty shone under a silvery blue sky. There was a long street of artistic log houses and stores on a commanding bluff, up which paths wound from the water. Roofs covered with earth and flowers, carried out in brilliant bloom over the porches, added the characteristic Yukon touch. Every door-yard and window blazed with color. Narrow paths ran through tall fireweed and grasses over and around the hill—each path terminating, like a winding lane, in a pretty log-cabin home. ”

“ Its wide blue water-sweeps, its many mountainous, wooded, and snow-peaked islands, the magnificent glaciers which palisade its ice-inlets, and the chain of lofty, snowy mountains that float mistily, like linked pearls, around it through the amethystine clouds, give it a poetic and austere beauty of its own. Every slow turn of the prow brings forth some new delight to the eye. Never does one beautiful snow-dome fade lingeringly from the horizon, ere another pushes into the exquisitely colored atmosphere, in a chaste beauty that fairly thrills the heart of the beholder. ”