your
hands, you will soon convert it into a solid lump of ice. That is
just what the sun does to the snowfield. It keeps melting the new
snow, and this presses down into the old snow, so that the weight
of the whole thing squeezes out the frozen snow into the valleys in
the form of glaciers. And, as this process goes on year after year,
the glacier would naturally keep going lower and lower down into the
valley were it not for the fact that the point (or snout, as it is
termed) of the glacier very frequently breaks off, and disappears into
the torrent of ice-water which flows away from it. So some glaciers,
although always moving, never grow any longer, but others creep a
little bit farther down each year.

There are many other interesting things about a glacier. One of them
is the moraine, which consists of heaps of rocks and stones broken off
from the edges of the valley by the great river of ice as it pushes
its way imperceptibly forward. These rocks are embedded in the ice
or borne on its surface, and are only given up when the extremity
of the glacier melts away into the torrent. Some of the rocks thus
transported are of immense weight, and the torrent is powerless to
move them; year by year, therefore, the jumbled heap of boulders and
rocks is added to until it often grows to an enormous size.

Another fine snowfield in the Hardanger district is the Joekul,
a splendid white dome, whose melting snows help to swell the
Voeringfos. The Joekul does not possess many large glaciers, but one
of them has, in past years, been a great source of trouble to the
people who live near it. This is the Rembesdal glacier, at the far
end of the Simodal Valley, near Eidfjord.

The Simodal is a beautiful and fertile valley, with farms on either
bank of the river, which rushes through it to the fjord. This river
comes from the glacier, but not directly. The head of the valley is
choked by a high cliff, over which tumbles a grand waterfall, and
this issues from a large mountain lake, into the opposite end of which
descends the snout of the glacier, with a continuous stream of milky
water flowing from it. So far there is nothing peculiar in all this,
but the peculiarity lies higher up.

Some little distance up the glacier, and almost at right angles to one
side of it, is a rocky hollow or small valley, and into this the water
begins to pour in the spring as soon as the sun is strong enough to
begin to melt the snow. The great glaci