Looking southward from our shelter, we had this great torrent and the
forested mountain wall above it on our left, the spiry ice-crags on our
right, and smooth gray gloom ahead. I tried to draw the marvelous scene
in my note-book, but the rain blurred the page in spite of all my pains
to shelter it, and the sketch was almost worthless. When the wind began
to abate, I traced the east side of the glacier. All the trees standing
on the edge of the woods were barked and bruised, showing high-ice mark
in a very telling way, while tens of thousands of those that had stood
for centuries on the bank of the glacier farther out lay crushed and
being crushed. In many places I could see down fifty feet or so beneath
the margin of the glacier-mill, where trunks from one to two feet in
diameter were being ground to pulp against outstanding rock-ribs and
bosses of the bank.
About three miles above the front of the glacier I climbed to the
surface of it by means of axe-steps made easy for Stickeen. As far as
the eye could reach, the level, or nearly level, glacier stretched away
indefinitely beneath the gray sky, a seemingly boundless prairie of ice.
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