It was a chill, misty morning, a year later, when the watch again sighted “Scidmore Island, one mile off the starboard beam,” and its long, green undulating shore was visible through the rain. Entering Muir Inlet, the _Ancon_ went cautiously through the floating ice and anchored in the curve of the south end of the glacier’s front, but a few hundred yards from a long shelving beach that would have shone with its golden sand in sunlight. There were the same deep soundings near the front, as on the other side of the inlet, but the _Ancon’s_ anchor was dropped nearer the moraine shore, where the lead gave only twenty-five fathoms.
Under the dull gray sky all dazzling effects of prismatic light were lost, but the fretted and fantastic front showed lines and masses of the purest white and an infinite range of blues. Avalanches of crumbling ice and great pieces of the front were continually falling with the roar and crash of artillery, revealing new caverns and rifts of deeper blue light, while the spray dashed high and the great waves rolled along the icy wall, and, widening in their sweep, washed the blocks of floating ice up on the beaches at either side. The ship’s cannon was loaded and fired twice point blank at the front of the glacier. The report was followed by a second of silence, and then an echo came back that intensified the first ring many times, and was followed by a long, sharp roll as the echo was flung from cavern to cavern in the ice.
[Illustration: SECTION OF THE MUIR GLACIER (TOP.)]
The small boats landed us on a beach strewn with ice cakes, and lines of stranded shrimps marked the wash of the waves raised by the falling ice. Some shrimps two and three inches long were found, but the most of them were delicate little pink things not an inch in length. The crimson epilobium blossoms nodded to us from every slope and hollow of the long lateral moraine that lay between the water and the high mountain walls. Over sand and boulders, and across a roaring stream that issued from the side of the glacier, the pilgrims crept to the foot of the slope, and then up a long incline of boulders and dirty ice to a first level where they could look out over the frozen waste and across the broken front. Deep crevasses seamed the ice plain in every direction, as on the north side of the frozen river; but, although the view is not so extended as on the other side, the level of the ice field is reached more easily, and it is a steep but only a short climb up over the buried ice to the top of the glacier. The treacherous gray glacier mud—“the mineral paste, and mountain meal“ of Prof. Muir—engulfed one at every careless step, and rocks would sink under one, and land even the high-booted pilgrims knee-deep in the fine, sticky compound. A half-mile from what appeared to be the bank of the frozen river, there was clear solid ice underlying the rocks and mud, and occasionally caves in this side wall enticed the breathless ones to rest themselves in the pale shadows of the glacier ice. Fragments and rounded pebbles of red and gray granite, limestone, marble, schistose slate, porphyry and quartz were picked up on the way, and many of the bits of quartz and marble were deeply stained with iron. The Polish mining engineer with the party assured us that all Glacier Bay was rich in the indications of a great silver-belt, and held up carbonates, sulphates, and sulphurets to prove his assertion.
