Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/482

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at length the slope pierced the very clouds, and, reappearing above the curling vapors, was lost in the blue canopy of the heavens.

Three glaciers were visible from my point of observation,—a small one, to the right, barely touching the water, and hanging, as if in suspensive agony, in a steep declivity; another, at the head of the bay, was yet miles away from the sea; while before us, in the centre of the bay, there came pouring down the rough and broken flood of ice before alluded to, which, bulging far out into the bay, formed a coastline of ice over two miles long.

The whole glacier system of Greenland was here spread out before me in miniature. A lofty mountain ridge, like a whale's back, held in check the expanding mer de glace, but a broad cleft cut it in twain, and the stream before me had burst through the opening like cataract rapids tumbling from the pent-up waters of a lake. The sublimity and picturesqueness of the scene was greatly heightened by two parallel rocky ridges, whose crests were to the left of the glacier. These crests are trap-dykes, left standing fifty feet perhaps above the sloping hill-side below them, by the wasting away of the sandstone through which they have forced their way in some great convulsion of Nature.

On the day following, I visited this glacier and made a careful examination of it, pulling first along its front in a boat and then mounting to its surface.

It would be difficult to imagine any thing more startling to the imagination or more suggestive to the mind than the scene presented by this two miles of ice coast-line, as I rowed along within a few fathoms of it. The glacier was broken up into the most singular shapes, and presented nothing of that uniformity