Returning to the open air, I pursued my way up the glacier for a couple of miles further, and discovered that this stream had its origin in the mountain on the right, where the melting snows rolled over the rocky slope, evidently by a newly formed channel, for the water was tearing through moss-beds and deposits of sand and silt, and, rushing thence on the glacier, tumbled headlong hundreds and hundreds of feet, down into a yawning chasm. This chasm or crevasse no doubt extended to the bottom of the glacier, and the water, after winding along the rocky bed under the ice, finally has found its way into the cracks formed by the ice in its descent over a steep and rugged declivity, and has slowly worn away the tunnels or culverts which I have described. I had now come to the gorge in the mountain through which the glacier descends to the sea. The view of the glacier from the margin is, at this point, somewhat like what I fancy the _mer de glace_ at Trélaporte, in the Alps, would be if the Grande Jorasse and Mont Tacul, and the other mountains which form the cradle for the _glacier de Léchaud_ and the _glacier du Géant_, and their tributaries, were all leveled. Instead of the variety disclosed in the Alpine view, the eye lights here upon one expanding stream instead of many streams, which narrows as it approaches the pass until it is about two miles over; thence descending the steep declivity to the sea, breaking up as it moves over the rougher places in the manner before described. [Sidenote: GRANDEUR OF THE GLACIERS.] In all my glacier experience I had not seen any thing so fully exhibiting the principles of glacier movement or so forcibly illustrating the river-like character of the crystal stream. To scale the glacier further was not in my power; but the eye climbed up, step by step, through the mountain-pass to the giddy summit, and as the imagination wandered from this icy pinnacle over sea and mountain, it seemed to me that the world did not hold any more impressive evidence of the greatness and the power of the Almighty hand; and I thought how feeble were all the efforts of man in comparison. As I turned away and commenced my descent, I found myself repeating these lines of Byron, penned as his poet-fancy wandered up the ice-girdled steeps and over the ice-crowned summits of the Alps:-- "... these are The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps, And throned Eternity in icy halls Of cold sublimity." [Illustration] [Illustration: TYNDALL GLACIER--WHALE SOUND (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY DR. HAYES.)] CHAPTER XXXIX.