When your ship, bound in, passes this Alaskan “Hell Gate,” she enters into a broad and ample expanse of water caused by the widening effect of two large bays which are just opposed to each other on the opposite shores. The coast of the Kenai Peninsula is low, the mountains contiguous are not high, though toward the interior the ridges become much loftier; but everywhere between them and this coast-line is that characteristic marshy tundra of the Arctic—a low, flat, broad strip, varying in width from forty to fifty miles, through which sluggishly flow a multitude of streams and brooks, wooded with birch, poplar, and spruce everywhere on the banks, but bare of timber over the great bulk of its expanse. As the inlet contracts still further, especially at the point between the two headlands of East and West Foreland, the tide again increases in velocity and violence of action until it attains a speed of eight and nine knots an hour, with an average vertical rise and fall of twenty-four to twenty-six feet. The northeastern extremity of this large arm of the sea, which Cook entered with the confident hope of finding a watery circuit of a continent, and, being disappointed, applied to it the name of “Turnagain,” presents a tidal phenomena equal to that so well recognized in the Bay of Fundy. Here the tide comes in with a thundering roar, raising a “bore” wave that advances like an express train in rapidity, carrying everything before it in its resistless onward, upward sweep. High banks of clay and gravel, which at low-tide seem as though they were far removed from submersion, are flooded instantly, to remain so until the ebb takes place. The natives never fail to remember the angry warning of this incoming tide; they always hurriedly rush out of their huts, scan quickly everything surrounding, lest some utensil, some canoe, or basket-weir be thoughtlessly left within the remorseless rush of that swift-coming flood. Those glacial sheets which fill countless ravines and cañons in the mountain ridges at the head of Cook’s Inlet, especially of Turnagain Canal, and avalanches of snow, from their lofty cradles thereon, all sweep down together upon the wooded flanks below, and are thus destroying great belts of forest and piling up innumerable heaps of rocky débris to such an extent as to often change the superficial aspect of an entire section of country from season to season; meanwhile the tide rushing up and down over this drift of avalanches and glaciers, carries the débris hither and thither, so as to constantly alter the channels, and the very outlines of the coast itself.