Letters from High Latitudes by Lord Dufferin
page 226 of 305 (74%)
page 226 of 305 (74%)
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the very harbour to which she had fled for refuge. This
bay is completely landlocked, being protected on its open side by Prince Charles's Foreland, a long island lying parallel with the mainland. Down towards either horn run two ranges of schistose rocks, about 1,500 feet high, their sides almost precipitous, and the topmost ridge as sharp as a knife, and jagged as a saw; the intervening space is entirely filled up by an enormous glacier, which,--descending with one continuous incline from the head of a valley on the right, and sweeping like a torrent round the roots of an isolated clump of hills in the centre--rolls at last into the sea. The length of the glacial river from the spot where it apparently first originated, could not have been less than thirty, or thirty-five miles, or its greatest breadth less than nine or ten; but so completely did it fill up the higher end of the valley, that it was as much as you could do to distinguish the further mountains peeping up above its surface. The height of the precipice where it fell into the sea, I should judge to have been about 120 feet. On the left a still more extraordinary sight presented itself. A kind of baby glacier actually hung suspended half way on the hill side, like a tear in the act of rolling down the furrowed cheek of the mountain. I have tried to convey to you a notion of the falling impetus impressed on the surface of the Jan Mayen ice rivers; but in this case so unaccountable did it seem that the over-hanging mass of ice should not continue to |
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