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Show 550. vertical walls which embraced it? This was the unexpected trial that always waits for the unwary. Yet it was also an opportunity, a promise, and a test of faith. It could lead the man and the dog who followed out of the vast glacier which was "an emblem of the valley of the shadow of death." Muir could be highly rational in investigating the nature of an ice bridge. Such bridges were formed when a crevasse opened; they melted and sank below the edges of the crevasse when they grew old and frail; this one had sunk down considerably and was consequently very old. He could also describe his crossing in technical terms which he had probably gleaned from the narratives of Tyndall. Yet while actually engaged in his perilous crossing, he claimed to be unself-conscious and beyond rationality: "At such times one's whole body is eye, and common skill and fortitude are replaced by power beyond our call or knowledge." Consequently he could not tell the reader how he got over the ice bridge, how he was delivered, or how he felt about the risk. If you are all eye you have neither memory nor voice. His attempted analysis of his encounter with death was over-rational, abstract, and like a sermon. Though he claimed he "oftentimes felt that to meet one's fate on a noble mountain, or in the heart of a glacier, would be blessed," even so, such a "quick and crystal pure" demise was hard to face. But he could see that Stickeen was not such a stoic. The scene became nicely emblematic. The willful, rational Muir and his second, emotional self stood divided by the abyss, |
