CHAPTER XI.. In the Sea of Ice.

In the Sea of Ice.

We appreciated the sun's warmth so long as we were cruising among the ice-wrack. Some of the passengers, having been forewarned, were provided with heavy overcoats, oilskin hats, waterproofs, woolen socks, and stogies with great nails driven into the soles. They were iron-bound, copper-fastened tourists, thoroughly equipped--Alpine-stock and all,--and equal to any emergency.

Certainly it rains whenever it feels like it in Alaska. It can rain heavily for days together, and does so from time to time. The excursion-boat may run out of one predicament into another, and the whole voyage be a series of dismal disappointments; but this is not to be feared. The chances are in favor of a round of sunshiny days and cloudless nights as bright as the winter days in New England; of the fairest of fair weather; bracing breezes tempered by the fragrant forests that mantle each of the ten thousand islands; cool nights in midsummer, when a blanket is welcome in one's bunk; a touch of a fog now and again, generally lasting but a few hours, and welcome, also, by way of change. As for myself, a rubber coat protected me in the few showers to which we were exposed, and afforded warmth enough in the coldest weather we encountered. For a climb over a glacier, the very thickest shoes are absolutely necessary; beyond these, all else seems superfluous to me, and the superfluous is the chief burden of travel.

We were gathered about the deck in little groups. The unpremeditated coteries which naturally spring into existence on shipboard hailed one another across decks, from the captain's cabin--a favorite resort--or the smoking-room, as we sighted objects of interest. With us there was no antagonism, albeit we numbered a full hundred, and for three weeks were confined to pretty close quarters. Passing the hours thus, and felicitating ourselves upon the complete success of the voyage, we were in the happiest humor, and amiably awaited our next experience.

Presently we ran under a wooded height that shut off the base of a great snow-capped mountain. The peak was celestial in its beauty,--a wraith dimly outlined upon the diaphanous sky, of which it seemed a more palpable part. When we had rounded this point we came face to face with a glacier. We saw at a glance the length and the breadth of it as it plowed slowly down between lofty rock-ridges to within a mile and a half of the shore. This was our first sight of one of those omnipotent architects of nature, and we watched it with a thrill of awe.

Picture to yourself a vast river, two or three miles in breadth, pouring down from the eminence of an icy peak thirty miles away,--a river fed by numerous lateral tributaries that flow in from every declivity. Imagine this river lashed to a fury and covered from end to end, fathoms deep, with foam, and then the whole suddenly frozen and fixed for evermore--that is your glacier. Sometimes the surface is stained with the debris of the mountain; sometimes the bluish-green tinge of the ancient ice crops out. Generally the surface is as white as down and very fair to look upon; for at a distance--we were about eight miles from the lower edge of it--the eye detects no flaw. It might be a torrent of milk and honey. It might almost be compared in its immaculate beauty to one of the rivers of Paradise that flow hard by the throne of God. It seems to be moving in majesty, and yet is stationary, or nearly so; for we might sit by its frozen shore and grow gray with watching, and ever our dull eyes could detect no change in a ripple of it. A river of Paradise, indeed, escaped from the gardens of the blessed; but, overcome by the squalor of this little globe, it has stopped short and turned to ice in its alabaster bed.

One evening, about 8.30 o'clock, the sun still high above the western mountain range, we found ourselves opposite the Davidson glacier. It passes out of a broad ravine and spreads fanlike upon the shore under the neighboring cliffs. It is three miles in breadth along the front, and is twelve hundred feet in height when it begins to crumble and slope toward the shore. A terminal moraine, a mile and a half in depth, separates it from the sea. A forest, or the remnant of a forest, stands between it and the water it is slowly but surely approaching. The fate of this solemn wood is sealed. Anon the mightiest among these mighty trees will fall like grain before the sickle of the reaper.

We are very near this glacier. We see all the wrinkles and fissures and the deep discolorations. We see how the monstrous mass winds in and out between the mountains, and crowds them on every side, and rubs their skin off in spots, and leaves grooved lines, like high-water marks, along the face of the cliffs; how it gathers as it goes, and grinds to powder and to paste whatever comes within its reach, growing worse and worse, and greedier and more rapacious as it creeps down into the lowlands; so that when it reaches the sea, where it must end its course and dissolve away, it will have covered itself with slime and confusion. It will have left ruin and desolation in its track, but it will likewise have cleft out a valley with walls polished like brass and a floor as smooth as marble,--one that will be utilized in after ages, when it has carpeted itself with green and tapestried its walls with vines. Surely no other power on earth could have done the job so neatly.

One sees this work in process and in fresh completion in Alaska. The bald islet yonder, with a surface as smooth as glass and with delicate tracery along its polished sides--tracery that looks like etching upon glass,--was modelled by glaciers not so many years ago: within the century, some of them, perhaps. A glacier--probably the very glacier we are seeking--follows this track and grinds them all into shape. Every angle of action--of motion, shall I say?--is indelibly impressed upon each and every rock here about; so all these northlands, from sea to sea, the world over, have been laboriously licked into shape by the irresistible tide of ice. Verily, the mills of the gods grind slowly, but what a grist they grind!

Let me record an episode that occasioned no little excitement among the passengers and crew of the Ancon. While we were picking our way among the floating ice--and at a pretty good jog, too,--a dark body was seen to fall from an open port, forward, into the sea. There was a splash and a shriek as it passed directly under the wheel and disappeared in the foam astern. "Man overboard!" was the cry that rang through the ship, while we all rushed breathlessly to the after-rail. Among the seething waters in our wake, we saw a head appearing and disappearing, and growing smaller and smaller all the while, though the swimmer was struggling bravely to hold his own. In a moment the engines were stopped; and then--an after-thought--we made as sharp a turn as possible, hoping to lessen the distance between us, while a boat was being manned and lowered for the rescue. We feared that it was the cook, who was running a fair chance of being drowned or chilled to death. His black head bobbed like a burnt cork on the crest of the waves; and, though we marked a snow-white circle in the sea, we seemed to get no nearer the strong swimmer in his agony; and all at once we saw him turn, as in desperation or despair, and make for one of the little rocky islets that were lying at no great distance. Evidently he believed himself deserted, and was about to seek this desolate rock in the hope of prolonging existence.

By this time we had come to a dead halt, and a prolonged silence followed. Our sailor boys pulled lustily at the oars; yet the little boat seemed to crawl through yawning waves, and, as usual, every moment was an hour of terrible suspense. Then the captain, the most anxious among us all, made a trumpet of his hands and shouted: "Here, Pete, old boy! Here, Pete, you black rascal!" At the sound of his voice the swimmer suddenly turned and struck out for the ship with an enthusiasm that was actually ludicrous. We roared with laughter--we could not help it; for when the boat had pulled up to the almost water-logged swimmer, and he began to climb in with an energy that imperiled the safety of the crew, we saw that the black rascal in question was none other than Pete Bruin, Captain Carroll's pet bear. He shook himself and drenched the oarsmen, who were trying to get him back to the ship; for he was half frantic with delight, and it was pretty close quarters--a small boat in a chop sea dotted with lumpy ice; and a frantic bear puffing and blowing as he shambled bear-fashion from the stem to stern, and raised his voice at intervals in a kind of hoarse "hooray," that depressed rather than cheered his companions. It was ticklish business getting the boat and its lively crew back to the davits in safety.

It was still more ticklish receiving the shaggy hero on deck; for he gave one wild bound and alighted in the midst of a group of terrified ladies and scattered the rest of us in dismay. But it was side-splitting when the little fellow, seeing an open door, made a sudden break for it, and plunged into the berth of a shy damsel, who, put to ignominious flight in the first gust of the panic, had sought safety in her state-room only to be singled out for the recipient of the rascal's special attentions. She was rescued by the bravest of the brave; but Bruin had to be dragged from behind the lace curtains with a lasso, and then he brought some shreds of lace with him as a trophy. He was more popular than ever after this little adventure, and many an hour we spent in recounting to one another the varied emotions awakened by the episode.

Heading for Glacier Bay, we found a flood of bitter cold water so filled with floating ice that it was quite impossible to avoid frequent collisions with masses of more or less magnitude. There was an almost continual thumping along the ship's side as the paddle struck heavily the ice fragments which we found littering the frozen sea. There was also a dull reverberation as of distant thunder that rolled over the sea to us; and when we learned that this was the crackling of the ice-pack in the gorges, we thought with increasing solemnity of the majesty of the spectacle we were about to witness.

Thus we pushed forward bravely toward an ice-wall that stretched across the top of the bay from one high shore to the other. This wall of ice, a precipitous bluff or palisade, is computed to be from two hundred to five hundred feet in height. It is certainly nowhere less than two hundred, but most of it far nearer five hundred feet above sea level, rising directly out of it, overhanging it, and chilling the air perceptibly. Picking our path to within a safe distance of the glacier, we cast anchor and were free to go our ways for a whole glorious day. According to Professor John Muir--for whom the glacier is deservedly named,--the ice-wall measures three miles across the front; ten miles farther back it is ten miles in breadth. Sixteen tributary glaciers unite to form the one.

Professor Muir, accompanied by the Rev. S. Hall Young, of Fort Wrangell, visited it in 1879. They were the first white men to explore this region, and they went thither by canoe. Muir, with blankets strapped to his back and his pockets stuffed with hard-tack, spent days in rapturous speculation. Of all glacial theorists he is doubtless the most self-sacrificing and enthusiastic. I believe, as yet, no one has timed this glacier. It is dissolving away more rapidly than it travels; so that although it is always advancing, it seems in reality to be retreating.

Within the memory of the last three generations the Muir glacier filled the bay for miles below our anchorage; and while it recedes, it is creeping slowly down, scalping the mountains, grinding all the sharp edges into powder or leaving a polished surface behind it. It gathers rock dust and the wreck of every living thing, and mixes them up with snow and ice. These congeal again, or are compressed into soft, filthy monumental masses, waiting their turn to topple into the waves at last. The wash of the sea undermines the glacier; the sharp sunbeams blast it. It is forever sinking, settling, crushing in upon itself and splitting from end to end, with fearful and prolonged intestinal reverberations, that remind one of battle thunders and murder and sudden death. There was hardly a moment during the day free from rumble or a crash or a splash.

The front elevation might almost be compared to Niagara Falls in winter; but here is a spectacular effect not often visible at Niagara. At intervals huge fragments of the ice cliffs fall, carrying with them torrents of snow and slush. Heaven only knows know many hundred thousand tons of this debris plunged into the sea under our very eyes. Nor was it all debris: there were masses of solid ice so lustrous they looked like gigantic emeralds or sapphires, and these were fifty or even a hundred times the size of our ship. When they fell they seemed to descend with the utmost deliberation; for they fell a much greater distance than we could realize, as their bulk was beyond conception, so that a fall of two hundred or three hundred feet seemed not a tenth part of that distance.

With this deliberate descent, as if they floated down, they also gave an impression of vast weight and when they struck the sea, the foam flew two-thirds of the way up the cliff--a fountain three hundred feet in height and of monstrous volume. Then after a long time--a very long time it seemed to us--the ice would rise slowly from the deep and climb the face of the cliff as if it were about to take its old place again; but it sank and rose, until it had found its level, when it joined the long procession drifting southward to warmer waves and dissolution.

In the meantime the ground swell that followed each submersion resembled a tidal wave as it rolled down upon us and threatened to engulf us. But the Ancon rode like a duck--I can not consistently say swan in this case,--and heaved to starboard and to larboard in picturesque and thoroughly nautical fashion. Some of us were on shore, wading in the mud and the slush, or climbing the steep bluffs that hem in the glacier upon one side. Here it was convenient to glance over the wide, wide snow-fields that seem to have been broken with colossal harrows. It was even possible to venture out upon the ice ridges, leaping the gaps that divided them in every direction. But at any moment the crust might have broken and buried us from sight; and we found the spectacle far more enjoyable when viewed from the deck of the steamer.

What is that glacier like? Well, just a little like the whitewashed crater of an active volcano. At any rate, it is the glorious companion piece to Kilauea in Hawaii. In these wonders of nature you behold the extremes, fire and ice, having it all their own way, and a world of adamant shall not prevail against them.