CHAPTER X.
ON THE MUIR GLACIER.
"Away up here!"
It was Bessie who was speaking her thoughts aloud, as she leaned uponthe rail of the good steamer _Queen_, and looked dreamily out over theblue water toward the mountains on the mainland.
"'Way up here, in Alaska! Really in Alaska! I can't realize it!" shewent 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 themap of North America, in the very upper left-hand corner. And I've comeall the way from Boston, across the whole continent."
It was indeed hard to realize that they were in those strange, far-awaywaters. Near the ship, porpoises leaped merrily through the sunlitspray of the waves. Now and then a queer-looking canoe shot by, paddledby dark-faced natives. On shore they could see only the pathless,boundless forest that stretched away for a thousand miles--an unbrokenwilderness--towards the North Pole.
It was late on the afternoon in which they sailed from Juneau. Whateveranxieties had been harbored in Mr. Percival's own mind, he had been atsome pains to conceal them from the rest of the party. "The hunters hadsimply tramped farther than they had expected," he said, "and foundthemselves too tired, after their first night in the woods, to reachthe ship at the time agreed upon. For his part, he was glad they werenot hurrying."
Although Mrs. Percival was by no means reassured by these remarks, andher husband's indifferent manner, she did allow herself to be somewhatcomforted; and the younger folk easily fell in with his method ofaccounting for the prolonged absence of the boys. With real pleasure,therefore, all but one settled themselves to a thorough enjoyment ofthe new scenes constantly opening around them.
THE DAVIDSON GLACIER.]
On leaving Juneau the steamer passed around the lower end of DouglasIsland, 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 strongsoutherly breeze, it was calm and comfortable even on the hurricanedeck.
An old Alaskan traveler had come on board at Juneau, taking passage toa cannery in which he was interested, farther north. There was also afamily 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 tothe sea front, dividing the dark forest that clothed both mainland andislands as far as the eye could reach.
"That is the largest glacier hereabouts--the Davidson," he said, "andthe most interesting. It's something like three miles wide at the foot."
"Oh! that doesn't seem possible," exclaimed a passenger standing nearby. "It doesn't look over a dozen rods wide. Are you sure you areright about that, sir?"
"Do you see that dark strip lying between this end of the glacier andthe open sea?"
"Where--O, yes! What is it--moss, or low bushes?"
"Those bushes are tall trees. There is a great terminal moraine twomiles from front to rear, pushed out by the Davidson, and a wholeforest grows upon it. Here, take this glass, and you can see foryourself."
The skeptical passenger was obliged to own himself in the wrong, andthe great, silent glacier--so motionless, yet forever moving towardthe ocean--seemed more mysterious and terrible even than the enormousice-stream of the Selkirks.
The _Queen_ now made her way past the Chilkoot Inlet, where, saidRandolph, who had followed Tom's example in "reading up" Alaska,Schwatka started to cross the mountains and explore the head-waters ofthe Yukon.
Pyramid Harbor, at the head of Chilkat Inlet, was now reached, and atthis point, the farthest northing of the route, or, to be exact, atlatitude 59 deg. 13', the steamer stopped her wheels, while the obligingstranger and the Thlinkets went ashore in a small boat, which tossedperilously on the choppy waves of the Inlet.
Slowly the steamer swung round, and, having picked up the boat on itsreturn, began its southward course. The wind now swept the decks withstinging force, driving the tourists below or into sheltered corners.
Against the western sky towered the mighty peaks of Fairweather andCrillon, lifting their white summits nearly sixteen thousand feet abovethe sea.
Until late in the evening the Percivals talked, laughed and sang, whilethe never-ending day still glowed brightly, and the waves tossed theirfoam caps in the golden twilight.
* * * * *
Thump! Bump! The girls woke next morning to find the ship tremblingfrom stem to stern. Had the _Queen_ run ashore? No, they were goingsmoothly 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 herberth jumped Kittie, and, drawing aside the curtain from their littlestateroom window, looked out.
What a sight it was! The ship was moving cautiously, at half-speed, upa narrow bay--Glacier Bay, they afterwards heard it called--surroundedby bare and desolate mountains, along whose upper slopes lay drearybanks of never-melting snow, and whose splintered summits were hiddenin dull gray clouds. Across the bay, at its upper end, miles away,stretched an odd-looking line of white cliffs. They could not yet makeout what gave them that strange, marble-like look. The surface of thewater was all dotted over with floating ice, of every size and shapeimaginable. Just in front of Kittie's window (which overlooked thebridge), the Captain, in thick coat and fur cap, was pacing to andfro. Even while she looked, the ship's bow struck against a good sizediceberg. Again the steamer shuddered, and the girls knew now what itwas that had waked them.
"Sta-a-arboard a little!" called Captain Carroll sharply, as anothergreat 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, underthe direction of the best pilot and captain on the dangerous Alaskancoast.
It did not take long, you may be sure, for the girls to finish theirtoilet and rush out on deck to see the fun. One by one the passengersjoined them, wrapped in all sorts of heavy ulsters and coats. The airwas like that of mid-winter, and the wind blew sharply.
The _Queen_ steamed up as near as the captain dared, and there, aboutan eighth of a mile distant from the head of the bay, she waited.
Now, indeed, was discovered the true nature of that line of marblecliffs. They were of solid ice, rising to the awful height of threehundred feet above the fretted sea, and stretching across the bay in amighty wall.
As the passengers gathered, shivering, on the forward deck, and gazedat this wonderful ice-river--the great Muir Glacier of Alaska--someone gave a sudden cry, and pointed to an ice pinnacle just abreast theship. With a majestic movement the huge mass of glittering ice, largerthan a church building, loosened itself from the cliff, and with acrash like thunder, plunged into the sea. A few moments later and thestaunch ocean steamer rocked like a little boat on the waves made bythe falling berg.
Again and again the ice came tumbling down. Sometimes immense pieceswhich had broken off from the bottom of the glacier, seven hundredfeet 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 inroaring cataracts.
"What are those sailors up to?" sung out Randolph suddenly, pointing toa boat's crew that was leaving the side of the ship.
"Going to fill the refrigerator, sir," replied a steward, who caughtthe question as he passed.
Randolph thought he was joking; but sure enough, the men in the boatgrappled a huge floating cake of ice, towed it to the gangway, and madeit fast to a tackle and fall, which picked it up and swayed it over onthe deck--a fine young berg of beautiful clear ice weighing somethingover two tons. Quickly it was stowed below, and other pieces followed.Although it was floating in salt water, the ice coming from the glacierwas p
erfectly fresh. In this way about forty tons were taken on boardand stored.
After breakfast all who wished to do so went ashore in the steamer'sboats, landing on a gravelly beach about a mile from the foot of theglacier. Bessie was obliged to remain on board with her mother, therest joining the shore-going party.
Leaving the beach they walked up over slippery rocks, gravel andprotruding bits of black ice, until, before they knew it, they were onthe glacier itself. Its surface was roughened and stained, and everynow and then they came to a wide crack or "crevasse" in the ice, withsloping, treacherous sides, its shadowy depths reaching no one knew howfar below. To fall into one would have been almost certain death.
"I wonder how thick this glacier is?" asked some one, peering down intoone of these terrible crevasses.
"About a thousand feet," was the answer. "The front of the glacier isover three hundred feet high, above the sea; that gives about sevenhundred 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 stillthe ice stretched beyond the utmost bound of sight.
As the party retraced their steps, the gentleman who had volunteeredthe information regarding height and distance, narrated the interestingstory of the discovery of the glacier by Professor John Muir. He toldthem how the intrepid Scotchman, on reaching Cross Sound, had hired anancient native guide and two or three Indians to paddle his canoe upGlacier Bay. As the mountain slopes surrounding the glacier were knownto be bare of fuel, the voyagers filled their canoe with dry cedar andpine boughs, that they might have camp-fires to keep them alive in thatalmost Arctic atmosphere, and to cook their food.
When the Percivals reached the head of the moraine, they were sofortunate as to find the professor himself standing there, talkingwith friends. He was spending the summer, it seemed, in a rude hutnot 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 wordor two from the famous explorer, Randolph and the rest descended tothe beach, not by the long muddy path by which they had come, but bystriking 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 icestranded by the ebb tide, they walked a mile or more beneath frowningice-cliffs, to the very foot of the glacier, and indeed under it, forthere was a sort of cave formed by the huge pinnacles of clear blueice, and into this dismal opening the young people penetrated for a fewyards, when a crackling sound in the gleaming walls made them rush forthe open air again in mad haste. They were just in time to escape anugly fragment of ice, weighing at least threescore pounds, which hadbecome detached from the ceiling.
After this experience they were glad to walk back to the ship, whichwas now whistling a recall to its absent children. On the way Kittiestopped to trace, with the tip of her parasol, her name on the smoothsand. 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, whowere 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 ascautiously 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 theship emerged from the narrow channels and gloomy, landlocked inlets ofthe 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 hadsailed so long through narrow passages and between dark, lofty sweepsof mountains, frowning with cliffs of bare rock, or shadowy withsilent ranks of pine and fir, that, like the Delectable Mountains in"Pilgrim's Progress," the hills seemed about to fall on them and burythe good _Queen_ out of sight under avalanches and icebergs.
All that night the waves of the Pacific rocked them gently, as the shipmade its steady way southward. What a volume it would make, if we couldhave 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 wasmotionless, anchored about half a mile from shore. She was in a bay,which was thickly sprinkled with pretty, wooded islands, as far outas the eye could reach. Fourteen miles away westward, rose the peakof 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, Edgecumbewas smoking away furiously only a generation or two ago.
The shore line was rugged, like all the southern Alaskan coast, witha narrow strip of level land running along the margin of the sea.Following this line the eye presently rested upon a collection ofhouses--quite a town, it seemed, just ahead. One large, square buildingwas a hundred feet or more above the rest. A sharply-pointed churchsteeple rose from among the lower roofs of the other buildings. ThenRandolph knew it was Sitka, the capital of Alaska.
He had hardly recognized the place when he heard his name called fromthe water.
Rushing to the side of the vessel, he spied a boat coming swiftlytoward the _Queen_, rowed with a sharp man-of-war stroke by foursailors 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 werelet down, and Fred sprang on board. Mr. Percival came more slowly,assisting Tom, who was observed to limp. The sailors passed up severalpieces of baggage, the officer in charge touched his cap, and away wentthe boat toward Sitka. As she receded, Randolph could read on the sternthe single word in gilt letters, _Pinta_.
What wild handshakings and congratulations and volleys of questionsfollowed on the deck of the _Queen_, you can well guess.
But we must let Tom explain for himself his adventures, his returnto civilization, and his unexpected appearance in Sitka harbor thatmorning.