Page:Mannering - With axe and rope in the New Zealand Alps.djvu/163

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We are now immediately below the great ice-fall, and the surface of the glacier presents an appearance not unlike the back of some enormous caterpillar wrinkled transversely by crevasses, which close up as we proceed downwards, and furrowed longitudinally by two large or main watercourses whose icy banks are in places 100 feet above their respective torrents. These two small rivers are fed from every direction by minor watercourses, and a mile or two further down discharge all their contents into crevasses and moulins, or water-shafts in the ice.

The locality of the glacier on which we now are is very interesting, for Nature's mills are here seen at work day by day. Glacier tables—blocks of rock perched upon pedestals of ice formed by the protection from the action of the sun's warmth—are of frequent occurrence. Glacier cones—heaps of sand and small fragments of rock raised by a similar agency (after having been washed to one spot by water)—are in places all around us. Then, strange and contradictory as it may seem, we see thousands of holes, each with a stone at the bottom and filled with the bluest of blue water, formed also in the first place by the rays of the sun warming the stone and causing it to sink in the ice. It is well-known in physics that water at 39° Fahr. is at its heaviest, and as soon as the warm stone—the dark colour of the