ON THE MUIR GLACIER.
"Away up here!"
It was Bessie who was speaking her thoughts aloud, as she leaned upon
the rail of the good steamer _Queen_, and looked dreamily out over the
blue water toward the mountains on the mainland.
"'Way up here, in Alaska! Really in Alaska! I can't realize it!" she
went on, turning to Rossiter Selborne, who was seated by her side.
"Just think, that shore over there is a part of the pink patch in the
map of North America, in the very upper left-hand corner. And I've come
all the way from Boston, across the whole continent."
It was indeed hard to realize that they were in those strange, far-away
waters. Near the ship, porpoises leaped merrily through the sunlit
spray of the waves. Now and then a queer-looking canoe shot by, paddled
by dark-faced natives. On shore they could see only the pathless,
boundless forest that stretched away for a thousand miles--an unbroken
wilderness--towards the North Pole.
It was late on the afternoon in which they sailed from Juneau. Whatever
anxieties had been harbored in Mr. Percival's own mind, he had been at
some pains to conceal them from the rest of the party. "The hunters had
simply tramped farther than they had expected," he said, "and found
themselves too tired, after their first night in the woods, to reach
the ship at the time agreed upon. For his part, he was glad they were
not hurrying."
Although Mrs. Percival was by no means reassured by these remarks, and
her husband's indifferent manner, she did allow herself to be somewhat
comforted; and the younger folk easily fell in with his method of
accounting for the prolonged absence of the boys. With real pleasure,
therefore, all but one settled themselves to a thorough enjoyment of
the new scenes constantly opening around them.
[Illustration: THE DAVIDSON GLACIER.]
On leaving Juneau the steamer passed around the lower end of Douglas
Island, and then headed northward once more, toward what is called the
"Lynn Canal."
The sun came out, warm and bright, so that although there was a strong
southerly breeze, it was calm and comfortable even on the hurricane
deck.
An old Alaskan traveler had come on board at Juneau, taking passage to
a cannery in which he was interested, farther north. There was also a
family of Thlinket Indians, bound for the same port.
The stranger pointed out various objects of interest, as they passed,
including many glaciers which sent their white tongues of ice down to
the sea front, dividing the dark forest that clothed both mainland and
islands as far as the eye could reach.
"That is the largest glacier hereabouts--the Davidson," he said, "and
the most interesting. It's something like three miles wide at the foot."
"Oh! that doesn't seem possible," exclaimed a passenger standing near
by. "It doesn't look over a dozen rods wide. Are you sure you are
right about that, sir?"
"Do you see that dark strip lying between this end of the glacier and
the open sea?"
"Where--O, yes! What is it--moss, or low bushes?"
"Those bushes are tall trees. There is a great terminal moraine two
miles from front to rear, pushed out by the Davidson, and a whole
forest grows upon it. Here, take this glass, and you can see for
yourself."
The skeptical passenger was obliged to own himself in the wrong, and
the great, silent glacier--so motionless, yet forever moving toward
the ocean--seemed more mysterious and terrible even than the enormous
ice-stream of the Selkirks.
The _Queen_ now made her way past the Chilkoot Inlet, where, said
Randolph, who had followed Tom's example in "reading up" Alaska,
Schwatka started to cross the mountains and explore the head-waters of
the Yukon.
Pyramid Harbor, at the head of Chilkat Inlet, was now reached, and at
this point, the farthest northing of the route, or, to be exact, at
latitude 59° 13´, the steamer stopped her wheels, while the obliging
stranger and the Thlinkets went ashore in a small boat, which tossed
perilously on the choppy waves of the Inlet.
Slowly the steamer swung round, and, having picked up the boat on its
return, began its southward course. The wind now swept the decks with
stinging force, driving the tourists below or into sheltered corners.
Against the western sky towered the mighty peaks of Fairweather and
Crillon, lifting their white summits nearly sixteen thousand feet above
the sea.
Until late in the evening the Percivals talked, laughed and sang, while
the never-ending day still glowed brightly, and the waves tossed their
foam caps in the golden twilight.
* * * * *
Thump! Bump! The girls woke next morning to find the ship trembling
from stem to stern. Had the _Queen_ run ashore? No, they were going
smoothly enough now. It must have been a dream, that that--
Thump!
That was no dream, any way, for they were wide-awake now. Out of her
berth jumped Kittie, and, drawing aside the curtain from their little
stateroom window, looked out.
What a sight it was! The ship was moving cautiously, at half-speed, up
a narrow bay--Glacier Bay, they afterwards heard it called--surrounded
by bare and desolate mountains, along whose upper slopes lay dreary
banks of never-melting snow, and whose splintered summits were hidden
in dull gray clouds. Across the bay, at its upper end, miles away,
stretched an odd-looking line of white cliffs. They could not yet make
out what gave them that strange, marble-like look. The surface of the
water was all dotted over with floating ice, of every size and shape
imaginable. Just in front of Kittie's window (which overlooked the
bridge), the Captain, in thick coat and fur cap, was pacing to and
fro. Even while she looked, the ship's bow struck against a good sized
iceberg. Again the steamer shuddered, and the girls knew now what it
was that had waked them.
"Sta-a-arboard a little!" called Captain Carroll sharply, as another
great berg loomed up, just ahead.
"Starboard, sir," repeated the quartermaster and the second officer.
"Stead-a-a-ay!"
"Steady, sir!"
"Port a bit!"
And so it went on, as the _Queen_ dodged now this way, now that, under
the direction of the best pilot and captain on the dangerous Alaskan
coast.
It did not take long, you may be sure, for the girls to finish their
toilet and rush out on deck to see the fun. One by one the passengers
joined them, wrapped in all sorts of heavy ulsters and coats. The air
was like that of mid-winter, and the wind blew sharply.
The _Queen_ steamed up as near as the captain dared, and there, about
an eighth of a mile distant from the head of the bay, she waited.
Now, indeed, was discovered the true nature of that line of marble
cliffs. They were of solid ice, rising to the awful height of three
hundred feet above the fretted sea, and stretching across the bay in a
mighty wall.
As the passengers gathered, shivering, on the forward deck, and gazed
at this wonderful ice-river--the great Muir Glacier of Alaska--some
one gave a sudden cry, and pointed to an ice pinnacle just abreast the
ship. With a majestic movement the huge mass of glittering ice, larger
than a church building, loosened itself from the cliff, and with a
crash like thunder, plunged into the sea. A few moments later and the
staunch ocean steamer rocked like a little boat on the waves made by
the falling berg.
Again and again the ice came tumbling down. Sometimes immense pieces
which had broken off from the bottom of the glacier, seven hundred
feet below the surface, rose slowly and unexpectedly from the depths,
throwing the water high in air. These bottom fragments were not white,
but as blue as indigo. From their gleaming sides the water poured in
roaring cataracts.
"What are those sailors up to?" sung out Randolph suddenly, pointing to
a boat's crew that was leaving the side of the ship.
"Going to fill the refrigerator, sir," replied a steward, who caught
the question as he passed.
Randolph thought he was joking; but sure enough, the men in the boat
grappled a huge floating cake of ice, towed it to the gangway, and made
it fast to a tackle and fall, which picked it up and swayed it over on
the deck--a fine young berg of beautiful clear ice weighing something
over two tons. Quickly it was stowed below, and other pieces followed.
Although it was floating in salt water, the ice coming from the glacier
was perfectly fresh. In this way about forty tons were taken on board
and stored.
After breakfast all who wished to do so went ashore in the steamer's
boats, landing on a gravelly beach about a mile from the foot of the
glacier. Bessie was obliged to remain on board with her mother, the
rest joining the shore-going party.
Leaving the beach they walked up over slippery rocks, gravel and
protruding bits of black ice, until, before they knew it, they were on
the glacier itself. Its surface was roughened and stained, and every
now and then they came to a wide crack or "crevasse" in the ice, with
sloping, treacherous sides, its shadowy depths reaching no one knew how
far below. To fall into one would have been almost certain death.
"I wonder how thick this glacier is?" asked some one, peering down into
one of these terrible crevasses.
"About a thousand feet," was the answer. "The front of the glacier is
over three hundred feet high, above the sea; that gives about seven
hundred beneath the surface."
"Do you know how long it is, from the source to the front?"
"Upwards of forty miles, I believe. And a mile wide at the mouth."
They could look up into the far-away, misty mountain valleys, and still
the ice stretched beyond the utmost bound of sight.
As the party retraced their steps, the gentleman who had volunteered
the information regarding height and distance, narrated the interesting
story of the discovery of the glacier by Professor John Muir. He told
them how the intrepid Scotchman, on reaching Cross Sound, had hired an
ancient native guide and two or three Indians to paddle his canoe up
Glacier Bay. As the mountain slopes surrounding the glacier were known
to be bare of fuel, the voyagers filled their canoe with dry cedar and
pine boughs, that they might have camp-fires to keep them alive in that
almost Arctic atmosphere, and to cook their food.
When the Percivals reached the head of the moraine, they were so
fortunate as to find the professor himself standing there, talking
with friends. He was spending the summer, it seemed, in a rude hut
not far below, and in company with some hardy young college students,
pursuing new investigations in this marvelous land of ice and granite.
Leaving Professor Muir, after an introduction and a pleasant word
or two from the famous explorer, Randolph and the rest descended to
the beach, not by the long muddy path by which they had come, but by
striking downward through a deep gulley, which brought them scrambling,
sliding and laughing to the sand below.
On this narrow strip of seashore, where were lying great blocks of ice
stranded by the ebb tide, they walked a mile or more beneath frowning
ice-cliffs, to the very foot of the glacier, and indeed under it, for
there was a sort of cave formed by the huge pinnacles of clear blue
ice, and into this dismal opening the young people penetrated for a few
yards, when a crackling sound in the gleaming walls made them rush for
the open air again in mad haste. They were just in time to escape an
ugly fragment of ice, weighing at least threescore pounds, which had
become detached from the ceiling.
After this experience they were glad to walk back to the ship, which
was now whistling a recall to its absent children. On the way Kittie
stopped to trace, with the tip of her parasol, her name on the smooth
sand. She began another, but after printing a large F, rubbed it out,
and with a little addition of color to her cheeks, joined the rest, who
were now tiptoeing across a narrow plank to the boat.
Steam was up, and the _Queen_ began at once to work southward.
For fifteen miles she wriggled her way out of the icebergs as
cautiously as she had wriggled in. Then the broad Pacific came in view,
and as the bell in the engine room rang, "Ahead, full speed!" and the
ship emerged from the narrow channels and gloomy, landlocked inlets of
the North, the great billows softly rocked in their arms the _Queen_
and its passengers, while they sang merrily,
"Out on an ocean all boundless we ride,
We're homeward bound, homeward bound!"
"What shall we see next?" was the question on every tongue that night;
and "Sitka! Sitka!" was the answer.
It was a comfort to get out into the open ocean again. They had
sailed so long through narrow passages and between dark, lofty sweeps
of mountains, frowning with cliffs of bare rock, or shadowy with
silent ranks of pine and fir, that, like the Delectable Mountains in
"Pilgrim's Progress," the hills seemed about to fall on them and bury
the good _Queen_ out of sight under avalanches and icebergs.
All that night the waves of the Pacific rocked them gently, as the ship
made its steady way southward. What a volume it would make, if we could
have the dreams of this party of a hundred souls on board the _Queen_
for that one night printed--and illustrated!
At six o'clock next morning Randolph went on deck. The steamer was
motionless, anchored about half a mile from shore. She was in a bay,
which was thickly sprinkled with pretty, wooded islands, as far out
as the eye could reach. Fourteen miles away westward, rose the peak
of Mount Edgecumbe, its slopes reddened with ancient streams of lava.
It was of that exact cone-shape, with its top cut squarely off or
"truncated," that marks a volcanic formation; and indeed, Edgecumbe
was smoking away furiously only a generation or two ago.
The shore line was rugged, like all the southern Alaskan coast, with
a narrow strip of level land running along the margin of the sea.
Following this line the eye presently rested upon a collection of
houses--quite a town, it seemed, just ahead. One large, square building
was a hundred feet or more above the rest. A sharply-pointed church
steeple rose from among the lower roofs of the other buildings. Then
Randolph knew it was Sitka, the capital of Alaska.
He had hardly recognized the place when he heard his name called from
the water.
Rushing to the side of the vessel, he spied a boat coming swiftly
toward the _Queen_, rowed with a sharp man-of-war stroke by four
sailors in neat suits of blue.
In the stern sheets sat--could it be?--yes, Mr. Percival, Tom and Fred,
all three waving their caps and shouting wildly.
In another moment the boat was alongside, the gangway steps were
let down, and Fred sprang on board. Mr. Percival came more slowly,
assisting Tom, who was observed to limp. The sailors passed up several
pieces of baggage, the officer in charge touched his cap, and away went
the boat toward Sitka. As she receded, Randolph could read on the stern
the single word in gilt letters, _Pinta_.
What wild handshakings and congratulations and volleys of questions
followed on the deck of the _Queen_, you can well guess.
But we must let Tom explain for himself his adventures, his return
to civilization, and his unexpected appearance in Sitka harbor that
morning.