st
mauve and violet tints. Only that; ice and snow and rock for mile upon
mile, until the tale of three hundred and fifty is told. No track or
trace of bird, no sweet companionship of little furred, four-footed
things, no blade of grass or smallest plant or flower, no sound but
the roar of the riven ice, the groans of the dying glacier.

I walked on slowly, looking inland towards the white fields
stretching away endlessly into the distance till the blue of the sky
seems to come down and mingle with the blue shadows in the snow.
Beneath my feet glimmered sometimes the green glass-like surface of
smooth ice, at others the thin crisp covering of drifted snow crackled
at every step. Sometimes the crevasses were so narrow one could easily
walk over them, others yawned widely, many yards across, necessitating
a long detour to pass round them.

Looking back from the side of one of them as I walked up it to find
the narrowest part, I saw the objectionable black dots had swarmed up
on to the edge of the glacier and through the thin, glittering air
their voices and laughter at intervals came faintly to me. I sprang
over the crevasse and walked on quickly to a point where the fissures
grew thick about my feet and the green-blue blood of the glacier
glowed in them on every side.

I was looking now down the inlet and was near enough to the face of
the glacier to hear, though dulled by distance, the crash of the
falling bergs into the foaming water beneath. I could not approach
nearer for crevasses hemmed me in; the ice showed itself clear of snow
and was so slippery I could hardly stand. One false step now, one
small slip and I should disappear down one of these green rents,
swallowed up in between those gleaming crystal sides to remain one
with the glacier for all time. My idea had been to approach the face
of the glacier from the top, but I found this to be as impossible, by
reason of the crevasses, as it had been to approach it from the sea on
account of the falling bergs.

Sacred, inaccessible, guarded above and below, the great gleaming wall
stood there through the centuries, defying the puny curiosity, the
feeble efforts of man to even gaze upon it and marvel over it, except
from a long distance. I would have given all I had to have been able
to advance to the very edge and, kneeling there, look over it down
those majestic palisades of white flushed through with green, throwing
back to the sun, their destroyer and conquer