the eye could reach, the level, or nearly level, glacier stretched away
indefinitely beneath the gray sky, a seemingly boundless prairie of ice.
The rain continued, and grew colder, which I did not mind, but a dim
snowy look in the drooping clouds made me hesitate about venturing far
from land. No trace of the west shore was visible, and in case the
clouds should settle and give snow, or the wind again become violent, I
feared getting caught in a tangle of crevasses. Snow-crystals, the
flowers of the mountain clouds, are frail, beautiful things, but
terrible when flying on storm-winds in darkening, benumbing swarms or
when welded together into glaciers full of deadly crevasses. Watching
the weather, I sauntered about on the crystal sea. For a mile or two out
I found the ice remarkably safe. The marginal crevasses were mostly
narrow, while the few wider ones were easily avoided by passing around
them, and the clouds began to open here and there.

Thus encouraged, I at last pushed out for the other side; for Nature can
make us do anything she likes. At first we made rapid progress, and the
sky was not very threatening, while I took bearings occasionally with a
pocket compass to enable me to find my way back more surely in case the
storm should become blinding; but the structure lines of the glacier
were my main guide. Toward the west side we came to a closely crevassed
section in which we had to make long, narrow tacks and doublings,
tracing the edges of tremendous transverse and longitudinal crevasses,
many of which were from twenty to thirty feet wide, and perhaps a
thousand feet deep--beautiful and awful. In working a way through them I
was severely cautious, but Stickeen came on as unhesitating as the
flying clouds. The widest crevasse that I could jump he would leap
without so much as halting to take a look at it. The weather was now
making quick changes, scattering bits of dazzling brightness through the
wintry gloom; at rare intervals, when the sun broke forth wholly free,