It certainly would be so _if_ the snow heaped upon those summits had no other outlet, no other means of escape to the Ocean--the goal of all Earth’s waters. But another mode of escape is found. Superabundant snow on mountain heights gets away by means of glaciers. We have had to think about liquid rivers flowing in the ocean, and here are solid rivers flowing on the land. Liquid rivers with liquid banks; solid rivers with solid banks. A curious anomaly in either case. The higher levels of land are drained by rivers pouring down to lower levels and thence into the sea; and it is the same with the mighty snowfields of Switzerland as with any gentle range of English hills, only here we have rivers of ice instead of rivers of water. But why not rivers of snow, if a glacier means the draining away of snowfields? Well, so they are--rivers of snow. But the heavy weight of overlying snow above, and the great pressure of descending masses later, welds the light and delicate snow into hard ice. Those tiny needles, of which the falling snow was made, are crushed closer and closer, till they form a solid block, which loses all resemblance to snow. In summer the melting of the surface by day, and its freezing again by night, help forward this transformation. Thus a glacier is literally an Ice-River, a huge long tongue of ice, squeezed from beneath snowfields, and creeping down a valley. Such rivers vary much in size. Some of the Swiss glaciers are between twenty and thirty miles long, in parts two or three miles wide, and often hundreds of feet deep. Starting above the snow-line they sometimes reach thousands of feet below it, the milder air failing to end their existence sooner. So enormous are the ice-masses, that not all the strength of the summer sun can make away with them. Of course, each square yard in turn does melt, and does help to feed the river of water which rushes away from the lower end of the glacier--sooner or later to reach the ocean. Switzerland’s grandest glaciers dwindle into insignificance beside the enormous ice-rivers of the frozen north. When the “Humboldt Glacier” of Greenland gets to the ocean it is about forty-five miles in width. A generous gift of water indeed, from land to ocean. Another monster glacier ends in a cliff of solid ice, rising in parts to four hundred feet of height. Greenland lies under one unbroken shield of snow and ice; and the weight of this tremendous “ice-cap” presses out numberless rivers of ice from its shores into the sea. These do not, like Alpine glaciers, end in rivers of water, flowing through milder climates to the ocean. The Greenland glaciers themselves reach the sea, each thrusting an enormous “foot” far into deep water. For a while, as it does so, the glacier-ice holds firmly together in a solid mass, gliding slowly over the ocean-bed, getting deeper and deeper, till only a small part of it shows above the surface.