CHAPTER I

THE TAKU INLET


It was just striking three as I came up the companion-stairs on to the
deck of the Cottage City, into the clear topaz light of a June morning
in Alaska: light that had not failed through all the night, for in
this far northern latitude the sun only just dips beneath the horizon
at midnight for an hour, leaving all the earth and sky still bathed in
limpid yellow light, gently paling at that mystic time and glowing to
its full glory again as the sun rises above the rim.

Our steamer had left the open sea and entered the Taku Inlet, and we
were steaming very slowly up it, surrounded on every side by great
glittering blocks of ice, flashing in the sunshine as they floated by
on the buoyant blue water. How blue it was, the colouring of sea and
sky! Both were so vividly blue, the note of each so deep, so intense,
one seemed almost intoxicated with colour. I stepped to the vessel's
side, then made my way forward and stood there; I, the lover of the
East, dazzled by the beauty of the North! The marvellous picture
before me was painted in but three colours, blue, gold, and white.

The sides of the inlet were jagged lines of white, the sparkling
crystalline whiteness of eternal snow on sharp-pointed, almost
lance-like mountain peaks; the water a broad band of blue, the sky
above a canopy of blue, and there at the end of the inlet, closing it,
like some colossal monster crouched awaiting us, lay the Muir, the
huge glacier, a solid wedge of ice, white also, but a transparent
white full of blue shadows.