Now you must not ask me to tell you what a glacier is like, for I have
never seen one; at least, those which I have seen were more than fifty
miles away, looking like white clouds hanging on the gray mountain sides.
And it would be an impertinence--that means a meddling with things which
I have no business--to picture to you glaciers which have been pictured
so well and often by gentlemen who escape every year from their hard work
in town to find among the glaciers of the Alps health and refreshment,
and sound knowledge, and that most wholesome and strengthening of all
medicines, toil.
So you must read of them in such books as _Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers_,
and Mr. Willes's _Wanderings in the High Alps_, and Professor Tyndall's
different works; or you must look at them (as I just now said) in
photographs or in pictures. But when you do that, or when you see a
glacier for yourself, you must bear in mind what a glacier means--that it
is a river of ice, fed by a lake of snow. The lake from which it springs
is the eternal snow-field which stretches for miles and miles along the
mountain tops, fed continually by fresh snow-storms falling from the sky.
That snow slides off into the valleys hour by hour, and as it rushes down
is ground and pounded, and thawed and frozen again into a sticky paste of
ice, which flows slowly but surely till it reaches the warm valley at the
mountain foot, and there melts bit by bit.
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