on to the edge of the glacier and through the thin, glittering air
their voices and laughter at intervals came faintly to me. I sprang
over the crevasse and walked on quickly to a point where the fissures
grew thick about my feet and the green-blue blood of the glacier
glowed in them on every side.

I was looking now down the inlet and was near enough to the face of
the glacier to hear, though dulled by distance, the crash of the
falling bergs into the foaming water beneath. I could not approach
nearer for crevasses hemmed me in; the ice showed itself clear of snow
and was so slippery I could hardly stand. One false step now, one
small slip and I should disappear down one of these green rents,
swallowed up in between those gleaming crystal sides to remain one
with the glacier for all time. My idea had been to approach the face
of the glacier from the top, but I found this to be as impossible, by
reason of the crevasses, as it had been to approach it from the sea on
account of the falling bergs.

Sacred, inaccessible, guarded above and below, the great gleaming wall
stood there through the centuries, defying the puny curiosity, the
feeble efforts of man to even gaze upon it and marvel over it, except
from a long distance. I would have given all I had to have been able
to advance to the very edge and, kneeling there, look over it down
those majestic palisades of white flushed through with green, throwing
back to the sun, their destroyer and conqueror, a thousand flashing
rays as if in defiance of the slow death being dealt out to them, like
one who dies brandishing to the last his sword in the face of his
enemy. I longed to look over, down the glimmering wall, to the
swelling rush of the green waters as they leapt up rejoicing to
receive the colossal diamond-like berg as it crashed down to them, to