Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/242

220 ; it was tremendous and overwhelming. The narrow valley, or gorge, of the Katún, which lay almost under our feet, was between 2000 and 3000 feet deep. On the other side of it rose, far above our heads, the wild, mighty chain of the Katúnski Alps, culminating just opposite us in two tremendous snowy peaks whose height I estimated at 15,000 feet. They were white from base to summit, except where the snow was broken by great black precipices, or pierced by sharp, rocky spines, or aiguilles. Down the sides of these peaks, from vast fields of névé above, fell seven immense glaciers, the largest of them descending from the saddle between the twin summits in a series of ice falls for at least 4000 feet. The glacier on the extreme right had an almost perpendicular ice fall of 1200 or 1500 feet, and the glacier on the extreme left gave birth to a torrent which tumbled about 800 feet, with a hoarse roar, into the deep narrow gorge. The latter glacier was longitudinally divided by three moraines, which looked from our point of view like long, narrow, A-shaped dumps of furnace slag or fine coal dust, but which were in reality composed of black rocks, from the size of one's head to the size of a freight car, and extended four or five miles, with a width of 300 feet and a height of from 50 to 75 feet above the general level of the glacier. The extreme summits of the two highest peaks were more than half of the time hidden in clouds; but this rather added to than detracted from the wild grandeur of the scene, by giving mystery to the origin of the enormous glaciers, which at such times seemed to the imagination to be tumbling down from unknown heights in the sky through masses of rolling vapor. All the time there came up to us from the depths of the gorge the hoarse roar of the waterfall, and with it blended, now and then, the deeper thunder of the