Alaskan History
“Upon each side of me, half a mile away, rose the same old mountains which I had seen everywhere from Tacoma north; at my feet, the same Pacific Ocean; but in front of me, apparently so close that I could almost reach it with my fingers, the perpendicular wall of a canyon, not of rock, nor clay, nor grass, nor forest, but of ice—a wall of ice a mile in length— and when I say a mile I mean over eighteen hundred yards of it; and when I speak of ice, I do not mean the sutty porous stuff that lodges in the valleys of the Alps; I mean the veritable, pure, crystal ice of the ice pitcher. If I did not know that it was ice, I should believe that it was glass. If I did not know it was the work of the Creator, I should believe that here had assembled a convocation of architects, who in their collective ingenuity had produced a combination of the chefs-d’oruvre of their art; for here were the buttresses of the English abbeys and flying buttresses of Notre Dame, turrets of the Normans, towers of the early English, spires of the cathedral in Cologne, wonderful unoccupied niches, pilasters of the purest white marble and green malachite, and decorative carving and high polish worthy of Cellini.”
!8
alaskan-history.com
