Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/485

 *charged into this main sewer, as the underground culverts which drain into the main artery the refuse of a city.

Returning to the open air, I pursued my way up the glacier for a couple of miles further, and discovered that this stream had its origin in the mountain on the right, where the melting snows rolled over the rocky slope, evidently by a newly formed channel, for the water was tearing through moss-beds and deposits of sand and silt, and, rushing thence on the glacier, tumbled headlong hundreds and hundreds of feet, down into a yawning chasm. This chasm or crevasse no doubt extended to the bottom of the glacier, and the water, after winding along the rocky bed under the ice, finally has found its way into the cracks formed by the ice in its descent over a steep and rugged declivity, and has slowly worn away the tunnels or culverts which I have described.

I had now come to the gorge in the mountain through which the glacier descends to the sea. The view of the glacier from the margin is, at this point, somewhat like what I fancy the mer de glace at Trélaporte, in the Alps, would be if the Grande Jorasse and Mont Tacul, and the other mountains which form the cradle for the glacier de Léchaud and the glacier du Géant, and their tributaries, were all leveled. Instead of the variety disclosed in the Alpine view, the eye lights here upon one expanding stream instead of many streams, which narrows as it approaches the pass until it is about two miles over; thence descending the steep declivity to the sea, breaking up as it moves over the rougher places in the manner before described.

In all my glacier experience I had not seen any