presented in the breaking up of one of our large rivers by a winter
flood; when the ice, in its full strength, enormous thickness, and
rock-like solidity, is rent asunder, with loud, crashing explosions,
and hurled up into ragged mountains, and borne onward before the
raging torrent with inconceivable force and frightful velocity,
spreading devastation along the banks in its course, and sweeping away
the strongest fabrics of human power which stand opposed to its
progress, like the feeble weeds that disappear from the path of a
tornado.

Such a spectacle, as they reached their proposed stand, now burst on
the view of the astonished travellers. As far as the eye could reach
upwards along the windings of the stream, the whole channel was filled
with the mighty mass of ice, driving down towards them with fearful
rapidity, and tumbling, crashing, grinding, and forcing its way, as it
came, with collisions that shook the surrounding forest, and with the
din and tumult of an army of chariots rushing together in battle.
Here, tall trees on the bank were beaten down and overwhelmed, or,
wrenched off at the roots and thrown upwards, were whirled along on
the top of the rushing volume, like feathers on the tossing wave.
There, the changing mass was seen swelling up into mountain-like
elevations, to roll onward a while, and, then gradually sinking away,
be succeeded by another in another form; while, with resistless front,
the whole immense moving body drove steadily on, ploughing and rending
its way into the unbroken sheet of ice before it, which burst,
divided, and was borne down beneath the boiling flood, or hurled
upwards into the air, with a noise sometimes resembling the sounds of
exploding muskets, and sometimes the crash of falling towers.

But the noise of another and similar commotion in an opposite