e islands dotting the smooth
surface of the waters below us seemed but specks, and the grand vista of
snowclad mountains guarding either side of Chatham Strait seemed
gradually to come to a point on the southern horizon. Westward toward
the Pacific was the marvelous outline of the southern portion of the St.
Elias Alps. The lofty peaks of Crillon, 15,900 feet high, and Fair
Weather, 15,500 feet high, about twenty-five miles away and about the
same distance apart, stood as sentinels over the lesser peaks."

The Muir glacier might be likened to a great inland sea of ice fed by
many tributaries or ice rivers. It narrows up at the point where it
empties into Muir Inlet to 10,664 feet, or a little over two miles. An
enormous pressure is exerted at this point, which causes the ice to flow
in the central portion at the rate of about seventy feet per day. There
is a continual booming, like the firing of a cannon, going on, caused by
the bursting of some great iceberg either before it takes its final leap
into the water or at the moment of its fall. At the point where these
great icebergs drop off into the water they stand like a solid wall 300
feet above its surface. Dr. Wright says: "From this point there is a
constant succession of falls of ice into the water, accompanied by loud
reports. Scarcely ten minutes, either night or day, passed during the
whole month without our being startled with such reports; and frequently
they were like thunder claps or the booming of cannon at the
bombardment of a besieged city, and this though our camp was two and
one-half miles below the ice front.... Repeatedly I have seen vast
columns of ice extending up to the full height of the front topple over
and fall into the water. How far these columns extended below the water
could not be told accurately, but I have seen bergs floating away which
were certainly 500 feet in length."

It is estimated that the cubical contents of some of these icebergs are
equal to 40,000,000 feet. This great glacier is fed by the constant
precipitation of snow upon the sides and peaks of the high mountains
that surround its vast amphitheater, which is floored with icebergs.
Wonderful as this seems to us to-day, it is scarcely a microscopic speck
of what existed during the ice age all over the northern part of North
America.

There are many other great glaciers in the mountains of the Pacific
coast. Some years ago I saw one of these immense glaciers in British
Col