Five Nights | Page 3

the ice-falls that seemed to
shiver the golden air there was intense and solemn stillness.
But the seals played merrily on their floating berg as they passed me,
and I watched them long through field-glasses as the joyous, turbulent
blue waves carried them far out of my sight towards the open sea.
The clanging of the breakfast bell made me leave my place and go
down for a hurried breakfast. I was chilled through, for the early

morning air is keen, the pure breath of infinite snowfields, and I took
my coffee gratefully amongst the crowd of hungry passengers.
Rough miners some of them, going up to Sitka from the great
Treadwell mine at Juneau, traders on their way to Fort Wrangle, and
some few explorers. Amongst them were four men our boat had taken
on board as we passed the mouth of the Stickeen river. They had started
from Canada, lured by the light of the gold that lay under the snows of
the Klondike, intending to travel there overland. Losing their way, they
had wandered with their pack train for eighteen months in these vast
solitudes of ice and snow, groping blindly towards the coast.
Food had failed them, their horses had died by the way from want or
fatigue. Faced by starvation, the men had eaten those of their pack
animals that had survived, then, finally, when hope had almost left
them, they came in sight of the sea.
They were talking of this and their terrible conflict with snow-storm
and ice-floe as I joined them, of the plans for making money with
which they had started and their failure.
I got away from them all and went back to my place as soon as I could,
and spent the rest of the morning as I had begun it, alone at the forward
end.
There were very few passengers like myself. Not many people for mere
pleasure would take that hazardous voyage along the coast, for it was
new country and not a tenth of the sunken rocks and dangerous shoals
were yet on any chart. All the way up along that rocky and treacherous
shore we had seen the evidences of wreck and disaster everywhere.
Above the flats of shimmering water, where the gold or crimson of
sunset lay, rose constantly the tops of masts, shadowy and spectral,
telling of the sunken hull, the pale corpses beneath those gleaming
waves. Ship after ship went down out of those adventurous little
coasting vessels that plied up and down the coast trading with the
natives, and as we passed these half submerged masts, we often asked
ourselves--"Will the Cottage City be more lucky?" She was trading,
like all the other boats that go there, with the Alaskan natives, and to go

as far north as the Muir was no part of the official programme.
But the fares of the few passengers who really wished to take all risks
and go there was a temptation and overcame the fear of the dreaded
Taku Inlet with its monstrous crashing bergs and its possibility of
sudden and furious storms. So the little steamer was here, creeping up
slowly through this vision of mystic blue towards the glacier, which lay
there white, vast, shadowy, mysterious, and my heart beat quicker and
quicker as we approached.
I went off in one of the first boats and the moment it touched the
pebbly strand of the side of the inlet I jumped out and walked away,
eager to be alone to enjoy the glory of it all away from the rasping
voices, the worldly talk of my companions, the perpetual "littleness" of
ideas that humanity drags with it everywhere.
As I turned from the boat the voices followed me clearly, distinctly, in
the exquisite rarefied air.
Thin waves of laughter mingled with them from time to time, growing
faint behind me, then the distance closed up between us and I heard no
more.
The steamer had landed about thirty passengers and crew, and they
seemed immediately lost in these vast expanses. When I had walked a
few minutes up the beach from the water's edge, I looked round and
was apparently alone. Some few black dots here and there disfiguring
the snowy slopes and glittering ice-covered rocks was all that remained
of them. In the midst of the vivid blue-green of the inlet behind me, a
little wedge of black, lay the steamer, the only reminder that I was one
also of these miserable black dots and in an hour I should be collected
and taken away as one of them. For this hour, however, I was free and
at one with the divine glory about me.
It was just noon. The sky was of a pale and perfect blue, the air still, of
miraculous clearness