The glacier expands on entering the water, as is the habit of all glaciers when unconfined, and ends in magnificent ice-cliffs some two miles in length. The water dashing against the bases of the cliffs dissolves them away, and the tides tend to raise and lower the expanded ice-foot. The result is that huge masses, sometimes reaching from summit to base of the cliffs, are undermined, and topple over into the sea with a tremendous crash. Owing to the distance of the glacier from Haenke island, we could {99} see the fall long before the roar reached our ears; the cliffs separated, and huge masses seemed to sink without a sound; the spray thrown up as the blue pinnacles disappeared ascended like gleaming rockets, sometimes as high as the tops of the cliffs, and then fell back in silent cataracts of foam. Then a noise as of a cannonade came rolling across the waters and echoing from cliff to cliff. The roar of the glacier continues all day when the air is warm and the sun bright, and is most active when the summer days are finest. Sometimes, roar succeeded roar, like artillery fire, and the salutes were answered, gun for gun, by the great Hubbard glacier, which pours its flood of ice into the fjord a few miles further northeastward. This ice-stream, most magnificent of the tide-water glaciers of Alaska yet discovered, and a towering mountain peak from which the glacier receives a large part of its drainage, were named in honor of Gardiner G. Hubbard, president of the National Geographic Society. [Illustration: PLATE 9. HUBBARD GLACIER.] Looking across the waters of the bay, whitened by thousands of floating bergs, we could see three miles of the ice-cliffs formed where the Hubbard glacier enters the sea. A dark headland on the shore of the mainland to the right shut off the full view of the glacier but formed a strongly drawn foreground, which enhanced the picturesque effect of the scenery. The Hubbard glacier flows majestically through a deep valley leading back into the mountains, and has two main branches, with a smaller and steeper tributary between. These branches unite to form a single ice-foot extending into the bay. The western branch has a dark medial moraine down its center, which makes a bold, sweeping curve before joining the main stream. There is also a broad lateral débris-belt along the bases of the cliffs forming its right bank. The whole surface of the united glacier, and all of the white tongues running back into the mountains beyond the reach of vision, are broken and shattered, owing to the steepness and roughness of the bed over which they flow. The surface, where not concealed by morainal material, is snow-white; but in the multitude of crevasses the blue ice is exposed, and gives a greenish-blue tint to the entire stream. Where the subglacial slopes are steep, the ice is broken into pinnacles and towers of the grandest description.