ROUNDED TRAPS AND INVITING BLUE SHADOWS This bigness increased as we reached higher mountain fastnesses. The exquisite Lakes in the Clouds, near Laggan, were frowned upon by scenery that was terrifying. Yet our guides promised to show us even more impressive crags. The ride to Mount Robson, sixty miles north of Laggan, and thirteen thousand feet high, was an outrage on men and packhorses. We could see over fifty glaciers up there, with more beyond the range of field-glasses. At Summit Glacier, literally the backbone of the continent, were miles of tunnels large as the New York subway, cut by glacier water through the ice. We used lanterns to explore one of them, but retreated in a few minutes, frightened by the unearthly blue light, the deathly cold, and the mystery. From that glacier flows water that reaches three oceansby the Athabasca River into the Arctic Ocean, by the Saskatchewan into Hudson Bay and the Atlantic, and by the Columbia River into the Pacific. We felt crushed, as we could hardly realize, although it was right before our eyes, the vast scale on which Nature works there. unique Emerald Lake, reflecting Mounts Field, Burgess, and Stephen, smiled below scenery almost as impressive. But it seemed commonplace after we again used pack-horses and stared, astounded, at the environment of the White Fire Falls of the Yoho Chasm, whose waters plunge, sheer, almost twelve hundred feet, as if choosing the steepest, highest place for the sake of the leap, so they may partly dissipate and float away as prismatic mist, into which sunlight often hangs ribbons of rainbows. Note the glacier far back at the top of the picture on page 494. It is twenty miles away and thirty-seven miles across. To reach its foot we toiled along the white yeast-fury of the upper stream, to where one of its two branches "comes in" from the left. A mile up that branch, two vast columns of water four hundred feet high fall side by side during half the night after a warm day-melted glacier ice roaring in the clouds almost a mile higher than the greater fall, which was photographed for this article during its small volume of early morning. The other branch of the Further west, seven miles north of Field, Yoho River is fed by the Wapta Glacier, chummed with that unearthly world. What deception of clear distances, what riots of actinic lights from the sun, moon, and stars, and what fantastic changes in the crimson, mauve, orange, and golden-greens of mockingly transient radiances of the aurora borealis ! These lights were caught and held in glints all over the world of frost-crystals. Or whirling veils of snow muffled the roar of that torrent, and were transformed into rain whose sun-pierced curtains were festooned with double rainbows. From pinnacles rising from the "plain" of the Wapta Glacier we beheld wild, immense areas of fathomless snow retiring to the limit of vision through the fieldglass. No other such impressive scene in North America! Below the glittering iceblanket along its edges, dark-green Douglas firs and conifer spruces, one hundred feet high, rose in myriad ranks thousands of feet, standing in solemn hosts along the mountain buttresses. More forest armies covered the lower terraces, valleys, and cañons in tangles of somber emerald. Twice we saw all this veiled by clouds, and watched the flitter of lightning and heard the crash, reverberation, and echoes of thunder. From such an environment Yet we grew less afraid, and began to Doré must have found the power which really venture out upon the face of the lives in his weird pictures. glacier, urged and encouraged by the We camped above the Twin Falls and guides from Switzerland. We felt the As we lay in our sleeping-bags, far in the night, the wind would seem to catch and carry off the noise of the falls as it would the mist from them. And when least expected, long, shuddering moans would rise from somewhere far down in the glacier as the vast bulk yielded to its own weight and pressure, and it settled to better rest in its bed. It was royal! What mystery, power, magnitude, and menace! |