Ice mountain

“ All that I can see is that through one of its sloping sides there streams a mighty torrent of sunlight, which pours its splendor with unstinting hand upon the wide highways, the broad terraces, the sheer parapets, and the sloping banks which diversify this ice world. Can it be that one side of this mighty mountain which nature has here hollowed out and set like a peaked roof over this vast subterranean region, is a gigantic window of ice itself through which the sunlight of the outer world streams in this grand way like a silent cataract of light, like a deluge of sunshine? ”

“ Many of the oldest bergs are beautifully ridged by the melting out of narrow furrows strictly parallel throughout the mass, revealing the bedded structure of the ice, acquired perhaps centuries ago, on the mountain snow fountains. A berg suddenly going to pieces is a grand sight, especially when the water is calm and no motion is visible save perchance the slow drift of the tide-current. ”

“ The sun has barely time to make the ice peaks glisten, ere the cold shadows creep over again. Snow lies thick on ledge and cranny, and only the steepest mountain faces show dark through the powdery veil. Bleak night winds whistle around the beetling crags and whirl and chevy the wreathing snow-clouds, making weird music in these desolate fastnesses, while the glaciers and snow-fields collect fresh strength against the time when their relentless destroyer shall attack them once again at an advantage. ”

“ But the fiord into which this glacier flows was, like the last, utterly inaccessible on account of ice, and we had to be content with a general view and sketch of it, gained as we rowed slowly past at a distance of three or four miles. The mountains back of it and on each side of its inlet are sculptured in a singularly rich and striking style of architecture, in which subordinate peaks and gables appear in wonderful profusion, and an imposing conical mountain with a wide, smooth base stands out in the main current of the glacier, a mile or two back from the discharging ice-wall. ”

“ It is but partly thawed and its cold, blue-green centre is enclosed in opaque, greenish-white ice and drifts of snow. Indeed snow is everywhere in broken drifts—in the furrowed mountain-combs and along the level in smooth white stretches. Close to the margin of the ice-sealed shores is a grotesque, sapless, scrubby vegetation, as strange in its way as the brilliant-hued waters or the rocks that impress us with huge antiquity and elemental crudeness, as though we stood face to face with Earth's infancy, close in the wake of ebbing, primeval seas. ”

“ These are driven onwards by the irresistible stream of solid ice; and when they arrive at a declivity of the mountain, sufficiently rapid, roll down, scattering ruin. I saw one of these rocks which had descended in the spring, (winter here is the season of silence and safety) which measured forty feet in every direction.
The verge of a glacier, like that of Boisson, presents the most vivid image of desolation that it is possible to conceive. No one dares to approach it; for the enormous pinnacles of ice which perpetually fall, are perpetually reproduced. ”

“ This is one of Nature’s perpetual ice houses, whose supply never becomes exhausted. Across the face of the mountain, near the summit, crossing this ravine at right angles, is another great depression or fissure, likewise filled with perpetual ice and snow. All the surroundings are rugged, rough, and broken, and you would never think of looking for the likeness of a cross in the wild, bleak desolation of ice-bound, snow-filled mountain chasms. ”

“ Sometimes he foams on high, like the snow of the mountain; sometimes he flows, shining clearly, an unbroken mirror, like the ice of the glaciers; and then descending into the valley, he reposes in the midst of nature's calm beauty. ”

“ An iceberg, or ice-mountain, is a large insulated peak of floating ice, or a glacier, occupying a ravine or valley, generally opening towards the sea in an arctic country.
2. A field is a sheet of ice, so extensive that its limits cannot be discerned from the ship’s mast-head.
3. A floe is similar to a field, but smaller, inasmuch as its extent can be seen. This term, however, is seldom applied to pieces of ice of less diameter than half-a-mile or a mile.
4. Drift-ice consists of pieces less than floes, of various shapes and magnitudes. ”

“ We now began to cross the glacier transversely, cutting steps with a hatchet, and after passing more than one deep chasm from six inches to two feet in breadth, we arrived at the crest of the mountain, so that I could stretch out my hand and touch it. Between France and Spain this natural barrier rises perpendicularly from the ice, and is said to be from three to six hundred feet in height.
It has an extraordinary effect to stand upon those immense masses of ice, and feel the vivid rays of the summer sun. ”

“ A short time ago it was at least two thousand feet below the surface of the over- sweeping ice; and under present climatic conditions it will soon take its place as a glacier-polished island in the middle of the fiord, like a thousand others in the magnificent archipelago. Emerging from its icy sepulchre, it gives a most telling illustration of the birth of a marked feature of a landscape. In this instance it is not the mountain, but the glacier, that is in labor, and the mountain itself is being brought forth. ”

“ Wherever a mountain is sufficiently lofty to pierce this upper stratum, its summit is covered with snow, and, as the snow never melts, it is plain that, from the accumulations of fresh snow-drifts, the mountain-tops, by gradually increasing in height and width, would become the supporting columns of vast hills of ice, which, breaking up at last from their weight and width, would roll down the mountain-sides and cover vast areas of country with a ruin and desolation more terrible than that of any avalanche. ”

“ The Great Ice-Fall
It is important that the reader should be able to see, in his mind’s eye, the situation of our camp at the head of the glacier, because to do so is to grasp the simple orography of this face of the mountain, and to understand the route of its ascent, probably the only route by which it [Pg 39] can be ascended. Standing beside the tent, facing in the direction we have journeyed, the great highway of the glacier comes to an abrupt end, a cul-de-sac. ”

“ It is like a palace of glass, and is the abode of the Ice-Maiden, the Queen of the Glaciers. She, the fatal, the overwhelming one, is in part a spirit of the air, though she also10 rules over the river; therefore she can rise to the topmost peak of the snow mountain, where the adventurous climbers have to cut every step in the ice before they can place their feet ”

“ Not only do the glaciers on the Alps, in Iceland, and other mountain regions, polish and striate surfaces over which they move, but even the ice-covering of an extensive area of land with a gentle slope, such as Greenland, produces similar effects by slowly moving down to the sea shore; and it is probable, too, that the great icebergs, some of which are 4 miles in circumference, and 1800 feet high, would, when grounding and moving along the sea bottom, also polish and striate rock surfaces. The love of simplicity has, perhaps, led theorists to attribute too much to one cause. ”

“ You see before you, as in this case, say thirty or forty mountain peaks, and between these peaks what seem to you frozen rivers. The snow from time to time melting, and dripping down the sides of the mountain, and congealing in the elevated hollows between the peaks, forms a half-fluid mass—a river of ice—which is called a glacier.
As it lies upon the slanting surface, and is not entirely solid throughout, the whole mass is continually pushing, with a gradual but imperceptible motion, down into the valleys below. ”

“ But obviously the rate at which the fronts of glaciers advance when forced by a mass of continental ice down fiords on a steep descending gradient, into a deep sea, where the front is floated off in icebergs, affords no clue as to that of an ice-cap spread, with a front of 1000 miles, over half a continent, retarded by friction, and surmounting mountain chains 3000 feet high. ”

“ These vast masses of moving ice, when they descend from mountains where the steeper rocks are clear of snow, receive on their surface the débris detached by frost from the declivities above, and bear these materials to lower levels or to the sea. Enormous quantities of rock-rubbish are thus transported in the Alps and other high mountain ranges. When the ice retreats the boulders carried by it are dropped where it melts, and left there as memorials of the former extension of the glaciers. ”

“ It must be allowed, that these prodigious ice mountains must add such additional weight to the ice fields which inclose them, as cannot but make a great difference between the navigating this icy sea and that of Greenland. ”

“ Then we have the struggle and confusion which attend the encounter of the young glacier with the first obstacles. An irresistible impulse urges the still half-formed ice over the edge, and it is transformed in a moment into a maze 343 of towers and blue abysses, of walls of marble-like snow seamed with the soft veins which mark each year's fall, of crystal-roofed and fretted vaults hung with pendant icicles. ”

“ Close by at the foot of the cliffs, a line of white foam everlastingly coils and uncoils itself, surging angrily against the glittering walls of granite.
In between, scattered over the grey waters, hundreds of icebergs are floating. In all shapes and sizes, these grim fragments of the eternal Arctic glaciers seem to keep guard over the sea. Like sentinels on the edge of the Polar regions they drift slowly back and forth in the Straits, obedient to tide and wind, leaving behind them a long wake of swirling eddies and floating cakes of ice. ”

“ Thus, by forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive, Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs—now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life—forest and garden, with all their wealth of fruit and flowers, the air stirred into one universal hum with rejoicing insects, a milky way of wings and petals, girdling the newborn mountain like a cloud, as if the vivifying sunbeams beating against its sides had broken into a foam of plant-bloom and bees. ”

“ Add to the picture of high mountains and snowy glaciers a sapphire bay scattered over with glittering little icebergs, and nature can supply nothing more to stir one's soul, to rouse the fancy and imagination, and enchant the senses. The vastness of this Muir Glacier is enough alone to overpower one with a sense of the might and strength of these forces of nature. Dry figures can give one little idea of the great, desolate stretches of gray ice and snow that slope out of sight behind the jutting mountains, and the tumbled and broken front forced down to and into the sea. ”

“ But, as I had left my coat in camp for the sake of having my limbs free in climbing, I soon was cold. The wind increased in violence, raising the snow in magnificent drifts that were drawn out in the form of wavering banners blowing in the sun. Toward the end of my stay a succession of small clouds struck against the summit rocks like drifting icebergs, darkening the air as they passed, and producing a chill as definite and sudden as if ice-water had been dashed in my face. This is the kind of cloud in which snow-flowers grow, and I turned and fled. ”

“ Climbing higher for a still broader outlook, I made notes and sketched, improving the precious time while sunshine streamed through the luminous fringes of the clouds and fell on the green waters of the fiord, the glittering bergs, the crystal bluffs of the vast glacier, the intensely white, far-spreading fields of ice, and the ineffably chaste and spiritual heights of the Fairweather Range, which were now hidden, now partly revealed, the whole making a picture of icy wildness unspeakably pure and sublime. ”

“ Something there is pathetic in the very emptiness of these old glacier valleys, these imperishable tracks of unseen engines. One’s eye ranges up their broad, open channel to the shrunken white fields surrounding hollow amphitheatres which were once crowded with deep burdens of snow,—the birthplace of rivers of ice now wholly melted; the dry, clear heavens overhead blank of any promise of ever rebuilding them. I have never seen Nature when she seemed so little “Mother Nature” as in this place of rocks and snow, echoes and emptiness. ”

“ On the glacier, a broad track, littered with blocks of ice, stretched upward in a straight line from the upper lip of the crevasse to the great ice-fall on the sky-line where the huge slabs and pinnacles of ice, twisted into monstrous shapes, like a sea suddenly frozen when a tempest was at its height, stood marshaled in serried rows. ”

“ After a heavy climb taken too quickly, when I put my foot first on the clear blue-green surface of the glacier, its immensity, its grandeur came home to me. The idea of the huge size of it seems to take the human mind in a curious grip and appal it. Three hundred and fifty square miles of ice stretched round me, white, unbroken, except here and there where gigantic fissures and ravines opened in its surface; ravines where deep blue-green colour glowed in the sides, as if it were the blue-green blood of the glacier. ”

“ Before we can get back, and get away to a safe distance, by the force of mere sailor power, back rolls the berg, up rises the broad slope, followed quickly by the precipices rising up, up, and up into lofty cliffs, with a foreground, a new revelation of ice; in a word, the prongs and spurs now below us in the transparent deep. In all this play of the iceberg and the sea, what will be our part? ”