Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/107

Rh slaty rock of Norway fails to retain the erosive markings of the ice plough, and has lost frequently its graven surface through frost. Again, the more characteristic traces must be found upon the steep slopes and narrowed exits of the snow-fields, and these are not always readily approached.

Along Drontheim Fiord, and in many localities over the shore and bays, the roches moutonnées appear repeatedly, and at Sognefiord the hard conglomerate, rounded into these huge knobs, is graven with channels and grooves. At Moranger Fiord the impressions increase in distinctness as we approach the glacial ridges which overhang it. The Bandhuus Glacier at one time extended to the sea, and the mingled heap of rocks it pushed before it now lies, a crescent of desolation, in its old path. One hundred years ago, by local traditions, the Suphelle Glacier, among the Justedals glaciers, extended across the entire valley into which it now debouches, and a series of recent moraines indicates its retreat. About 3,600 feet in front of the Krondal and Nygaard glaciers, terminal moraines, unmistakably modern, are seen, while the evidence of their erosive action is found in the increasing definiteness of the rocky striations as we advance over the land last scored toward the glacier, this same track being sown with bowlders and pebbles, relics of their past ravages. Two hundred feet above the Nygaard, on the face of the cliff, we can read, as legibly as we do the record of the fallen tide, the annals of its past increase; and local tradition, stories of destruction, removal of villages and houses, corroborate this ocular examination. In short, in Norway, as in the Alps, the characteristics of glacial denudation, as seen in the forces now at work, appear to perpetuate the memory of agencies which, on a magnificent scale, operated upon continents.

Turning our eyes from the picturesque surprises of the Scandinavian cliffs and streams, let us fix them upon the multitudinous slopes and the confused outlines of the Himalaya Mountains, as they rise to the plains of Thibet, and read their lesson. Here we shall encounter the same arctic currents cleaving the fissures

Upon their surface we see the same long avenues of bowlders, fed in their tedious course from every faltering cliff or frost-riven peak, and their ancient channels indelibly indicated in the disordered débris of rocks and pebbles filched from quarries leagues away.

The Himalaya Mountains mark the northern frontier of India, and form the most important section of that long axis of elevation which reaches from the Bosporus to the Pacific, and separates, as a similar girdle does in Europe, the northern plains and table-land from the low peninsulas and milder districts of the south. The Himalayas ascend to the grandest heights, and in their sublime elevation crown the continental water-shed with earth's most stupendous peaks. Their passes