Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/347

 Rh moving imperceptibly to wreckage piles that had existed for centuries.

Everywhere on the Tasman Glacier were deep and dangerous fissures that looked to be bottomless. Before these some people, I was told, become so terrified by their aspect that they lose sight of beauty in fear of injury or death. On the glacier's ever-changing surface there are no well-defined tracks, as some visitors expect to find. The guides make their tracks as they go, and they have new ones every day. Of the ice streams flowing into the Tasman Glacier the finest is Hochstetter Ice Fall, a precipitous glacier descending from Mounts Tasman and Cook. It is four thousand feet high, a mile wide, and "a thousand Niagaras frozen into one." The whole is a crumpled, shattered mass of blue, white-capped walls and ridges, and deep crevasses.

The roughest part of the Tasman Glacier is the Fall, where a spur of the Malte Brun Range thrusts itself into the glacier as it swings to meet the Rudolph Glacier. The Fall consists of frozen rapids that have a descent of five hundred feet in one mile. If the glacier could be melted suddenly, there would be created here rapids such as the world perhaps has never known. And with all its rapidity, it would take the melted river a good while to exhaust itself, for in places the glacier is estimated to be one thousand feet deep, and opposite to Malte Brun Hut it is said to be fifteen hundred feet deep. As we proceeded up the Tasman Glacier we heard,