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While thus flying through the air a small portion escapes from the mountains to the sky as vapor; but far the greater part is at length locked fast in bossy overcurling cornices along the ridges, or in stratified sheets in the glacier cirques, some of it to replenish the small residual glaciers and remain silent and rigid for centuries before it is finally melted and sent singing down home to the sea.
Of the one beneath our feet we see only fragmentary sections in cirques and amphitheaters and on the sides of the out-jutting promontories between them, while the other, though far distant, is beheld in all its glory of color and noble proportions the one supreme beauty and wonder to which the eye is ever turning.
Marvelously extensive, without the slightest appearance of waste or excess, they cover roofs and dome-tops and the base of every cliff, belt each spire and pyramid and massy, towering temple, and in beautiful continuous lines go sweeping along the great walls in and out around all the intricate system of side-cañons, amphitheaters, cirques, and scallops into which they are sculptured.
He looked to the past and the future. To the past, for no one was more keenly interested in archaeology. He delighted to wander on forlorn moors among what Shelley calls "dismal cirques of Druid stones." To the future, for he continued to study spiritualism, and to gaze into crystals. He longed to make himself master of the "darkling secrets of Eternity."
Beneath their lake- like expanse of sluggish or stagnant ice a broad sheet of ground moraine is probably being deposited. Cirques and glaciated valleys rapidly lose their characteristic forms after the ice has withdrawn. The weather destroys all smoothed, polished, and scored surfaces which are not protected beneath glacial deposits.
These precipices, and the razor edge, are fortified and buttressed by arms which reach out westward and form rude crescents, called by the French geologists cirques, for here the snow lodges, and is packed to great density and solidity with all the force, fervor and fury of the mountain winds. But the snow does not fall alone on the western cirques.
After the main trunk canyon was melted out, its side branches, drawing their sources from a height of three or four to five or six thousand feet, were cut off, and of course became separate glaciers, occupying cirques and branch canyons along the tops and sides of the walls.
Here the configuration and arrangement of the rock-masses also have created a number of cirques, where remnants of the winter's snow masses are yet to be seen. These snow masses are baby glaciers, or snow being slowly manufactured into glaciers, or, as some authorities think, the remnants of the vast glaciers that once covered this whole region with their heavy and slowly-moving icy cap.
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