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“Yes, I know; they have spoken of the open sea.” “Do you not believe that such a sea exists?” “Yes, I do believe that it exists, and for valid reasons. In fact, it is perfectly manifest that these masses, called icebergs and icefields, could not be formed in the ocean itself.
According to tradition, the ruling royal family took its rise where the icefields of some of the loftiest summits of the Andes are reflected in the mirror of Lake Titicaca. The king was called Inca, and when we speak of the Inca Kingdom we mean old Peru, whose people were crushed and annihilated by the Spaniards.
It is roughly circular, and, as I perceived in descending, stands very high, its table-like summit being some 4000 feet, as I subsequently ascertained, above the sea-level. Its surface, however, was perfectly white scarcely less brilliant, consequently, than an equal area of the polar icefields.
A description written to the Times the next morning, while the impression was still fresh, and from notes made at this period, ran thus: "Away to an infinitely distant horizon stretched rolling billows of snowy whiteness, broken up here and there into seeming icefields, with huge fantastic hummocks.
Here are icefields as big as inland seas on which the tumbled boulders lie so thickly that strange little flowers can bloom among them under the untempered sunshine.
Lawrence we begin to feel the roll of the great waves, but we need not at this time of year expect anything very bad, and we shall see no icebergs. The early summer is the worst time for them, for the warm currents have loosened them from the icefields in the north, and they float southwards.
The endless icefields soaked up the dim light, reflecting it back as a colder and harsher illumination. A single figure on skis cut a line across the empty plain; nothing else moved. The depression of the ultimate fatigue fell on Brion and everything changed, as if he looked in a mirror at a previously hidden side.
The hunters had no other deprivation to deplore than that of two dogs, which they lost in an expedition to reconnoitre the state of the icefields, twenty-five miles to the southward. The month of February was signalized by violent tempests and abundant snows. The mean temperature was still twenty-five degrees below zero, but they did not suffer in comparison with past hardships.
As regards the geological indications of age, the best authority seems to point to the first appearance of man in the post-glacial times: that is to say, that the gravels in which the palaeolithic implements are found were deposited by the action of fresh water after the great glacial period, when, at any rate, Northern Europe, a great part of Russia, all Scandinavia, and part of North America were covered with icefields, the great glaciers of which left their mark in the numerous scoopings out of ravines and lake beds and in the raising of banks and mounds, the deposit of boulders, and the striation of rocks in situ, which so many districts exhibit.
The gigantic phenomena and wonderful agencies of that marvellous period in geological history its vast icefields and glaciers, with their movements, drifts, and denudations its coast ice and glacial lakes and rivers the risings and sinkings of level of islands and continents, are all considered and discussed in a thoroughly intelligent and scholarly manner.
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