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Lawrence descended with him, and thus planted his foot on glacier-ice for the first time, as Lewis afterwards remarked, in the pursuit scientific knowledge.
There are many local gods on the road through the Rockies: old bald mountains that have parted with every shred of verdure and stand wrapped in sheets of wrinkled silver rock, over which the sight travels slowly as in delirium; mad, horned mountains, wreathed with dancing mists; low-browed and bent-shouldered faquirs of the wayside, sitting in meditation beneath a burden of glacier-ice that thickens every year; and mountains of fair aspect on one side, but on the other seamed with hollow sunless clefts, where last year's snow is blackened with this year's dirt and smoke of forest-fires.
Now, although this glacier-ice is clear and hard, it is not quite so solid as pure ice, and when it is pushed down into the valleys by the increasing masses above it, actually flows. But this flowing motion cannot be seen. It is like the motion of the hour hand of a watch, which cannot be perceived however closely it may be looked at.
The floor of the first chamber is composed of glacier-ice, separated from the side walls by a cleft from 1 to 3 feet wide, where it shows a depth of from 4 to 6 feet; it is as smooth as glass, and about 6 fathoms from the entrance a cone of ice stands upon it, 8 or 9 feet high.
"Bergy Bits". Pieces, about the size of a cottage, of glacier-ice or of hummocky pack washed clear of snow. "Growlers". Still smaller pieces of sea-ice than the above, greenish in colour, and barely showing above water-level. "Crack". Any sort of fracture or rift in the sea-ice covering. "Lead" or "Lane". Where a crack opens out to such a width as to be navigable.
Crevasses in the glacier-ice were far too frequent to permit of reckless speed even in a clear atmosphere, and then there were hideous precipices along the edges of which our way often led us. I shivered as I thought of the poor old fellow's peril. At the top of my lungs I called to him to stop, but he did not answer me.
Forbes, by his careful measurements and investigations, proved incontestably that in some glaciers the central portion travelled down its valley at double or treble the rate of its sides, without the continuity of the mass being broken. In small masses, indeed, glacier-ice is to all appearance rigid, but on a large scale it is unquestionably ductile."
The water-courses had cut deep channels through these beds, and down into the rock below; so that the streams from the melted snow rushed down between walls of lava, in which traces of columnar structure were observable. The snow we had travelled over was sometimes dry and powdery, and sometimes hard and compact. There were no glaciers, and no glacier-ice, properly so called.
The two bags of clothing were bobbing about amid the brash and glacier-ice to the windward side of the spit, and it did not seem possible to reach them. The gale continued all day, and the fine drift from the surface of the glacier was added to the big flakes of snow falling from the sky.
We turned in early that night, and I remember that I dreamed of the great wave and aroused my companions with a shout of warning as I saw with half-awakened eyes the towering cliff on the opposite side of the cove. Shortly before midnight a gale sprang up suddenly from the north-east with rain and sleet showers. It brought quantities of glacier-ice into the cove, and by 2 a.m.
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