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the great glacial cirques, with their stupendous precipices from which the vast ice-sheets started, which gouged, smoothed, planed and grooved millions of acres of solid granite into lake-beds, polished domes and canyon walls and carried along millions of tons of rock debris to make scores of lateral and terminal moraines; together with the evidences of uplift, subsidence and volcanic outpouring of diorite and other molten rocks, afford one as vast and enjoyable a field for contemplation as any ordinary man can find in the Grand Canyon.
Others lie back in fountain cirques walled in all around save at the lower edge over which they pour in blue cascades. Snow, too, lay in folds and patches of every form on blunt, rounded ridges in curves, arrowy lines, dashes, and narrow ornamental flutings among the summit peaks and in broad radiating wings on smooth slopes.
But instead of being plain, the walls are so deeply and elaborately carved into all sorts of recesses alcoves, cirques, amphitheaters, and side-cañons that were you to trace the rim closely around on both sides your journey would be nearly a thousand miles long.
Such mountain hollows are termed CIRQUES. As a powerful spring wears back a recess in the valley side where it discharges, so the fountain head of a glacier gradually wears back a cirque. In its slow movement the neve field broadly scours its bed to a flat or basined floor. Meanwhile the sides of the valley head are steepened and driven back to precipitous walls.
Its western exposure, however, is of a fairly gentle slope, so that the snow was blown over to the eastern side, where there are several precipitous cirques of stupendous size for the preservation of the accumulated and accumulating snow.
Like a river, a glacier does not everywhere erode. In places it leaves its bed undisturbed and in places aggrades it by deposits of the ground moraine. CIRQUES. Valley glaciers commonly head as we have seen, in broad amphitheaters deeply filled with snow and ice.
This was open ground, a breadth of turf bordering on one of the great cirques a rudely oval pit at a guess little less than seven hundred feet in its narrowest diameter and something like four hundred in depth, a vast black well against whose darkness the blue-white moonglare etched a strange grouping of figures, seven in all.
Thus the canyon grows wider and deeper. So also do the side canyons and amphitheaters, while secondary gorges and cirques gradually isolate masses of the promontories, forming new buildings, all of which are being weathered and pulled and shaken down while being built, showing destruction and creation as one.
Now let us, in imagination, ascend in a balloon over this region and hover there, seeking to reconstruct, by mental images, the appearance it must have assumed and the action that took place in the ages long ago. Snow, thirty, fifty, one hundred or more feet deep lay, on the level, and on the mountain slopes or in precipitous cirques twice, thrice, or ten times those depths.
In the western mountains of the United States many cirques, now empty of neve and glacier ice, and known locally as "basins," testify to the fact that in recent times the snow line stood beneath the levels of their floors, and thus far below its present altitude.
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