ere fully a mile and a half from the edge of the
glacier before we found it safe to land.

[Illustration: MUIR GLACIER

Returning down Glacier Bay, we visited the largest glacier of all, which
was to bear Muir's name]

Muir spent a whole day alone on the glacier, walking over twenty miles
across what he called the glacial lake between two mountains. A cold,
penetrating, mist-like rain was falling, and dark clouds swept up the
bay and clung about the shoulders of the mountains. When night
approached and Muir had not returned, I set the Indians to digging out
from the bases of the gravel hills the frazzled stumps and logs that
remained of the buried forests. These were full of resin and burned
brightly. I made a great fire and cooked a good supper of venison,
beans, biscuit and coffee. When pitchy darkness gathered, and still Muir
did not come, Tow-a-att made some torches of fat spruce, and taking with
him Charley, laden with more wood, he went up the beach a mile and a
half, climbed the base of the mountain and kindled a beacon which
flashed its cheering rays far over the glacier.

Muir came stumbling into camp with these two Indians a little before
midnight, very tired but very happy. "Ah!" he sighed, "I'm glad to be in
camp. The glacier almost got me this time. If it had not been for the
beacon and old Tow-a-att, I might have had to spend the night on the
ice. The crevasses were so many and so bewildering in their mazy,
crisscross windings that I was actually going farther into the glacier
when I caught the flash of light."

I brought him to the tent and placed the hot viands before him. He
attacked them ravenously, but presently was talking again:

"Man, man; you ought to have been with me. You'll never make up what you
have lost to-day. I've been wandering through a thousand rooms of God's
crystal temple. I've been a thousand feet down in the crevasses, with
matchless domes and sculptured figures and carved ice-work all about me.
Solomon's marble and ivory palaces were nothing to it. Such purity, such
color, such delicate beauty! I was tempted to stay there and feast my
soul, and softly freeze, until I would become part of the glacier. What
a great death that would be!"

Again and again I would have to remind Muir that he was eating his
supper, but it was more than an hour before I could get him to finish
the meal, and two or three hours longer before he stopped talking and
went to sleep. I wish I had taken d