OCR Text |
Show 89 wilderness, this pathless place, he found well marked glacial highways. This paradox became clearer as he continued to follow the "guidance of a stream," and was urged forward by the "main lateral moraines that stretch so formally from the huge jaws of the amphitheater." He dramatized his own walking as almost passive, simply as a matter of following the topographical invitation which the glacier had left. He did not dwell on his discovery of glacial silt, or even on the form of the glacier itself, but saved his eloquence for a journey down into the womb of the glacier, the bergshrund. A series of rugged zig-zags enabled me to make my way down into the weird ice world of the Shrund. Its chambered hollows were hung with a multitude of clustered icicles, amidst which thin subdued light pulsed and shimmered with indescribable loveliness. Water dripped and tinkled overhead, and from far below there came strange solemn murmurs from currents that were feeling their way among veins and fissures on the bottom. Ice creations of this kind are perfectly enchanting, notwithstanding one feels so entirely out of place in their pure fountain beauty. I was soon uncomfortably cold in my shirt sleeves, and the leaning wall of the Shrund seemed really to ingulph me. Yet it was hard to leave the delicious music of the water, and still more intense loveliness of the light. There is a good deal more than scientific observation operating in this passage, but let me consider first the purely geological |