"It was an enchanting trip up that narrow channel of deep water, rippling between bold island shores and parallel mountain walls. Beside clear emerald tide, reflecting tree and rock, there was the beauty of foaming cataracts leaping down the sides of snow-capped mountains and the grandeur of great glaciers pushing down through sharp ravines and dropping miniature icebergs into the sea. Touched by the last light of the sun, Patterson Glacier was a frozen lake of a wonderland, shining with silvery lights, and showing a pale ethereal green and deep, pure blue in all the rifts and crevices of its icy front."
From Wrangell on to Juneau the entrance to Taku Inlet is passed. The far-famed Taku Glacier is differentiated by the extreme brilliancy of its colouring from all other glaciers of the Alaskan regions. Taku Inlet, with its forty-five ice streams, is a fitting approach to this marvel of Nature. Every blast of the steamer's whistle is as the call of a giant monster which is answered by masses of ice that, detached by the vibration, plunge headlong into the sea with a noise like thunder. "That day on the Taku Glacier will live forever as one of the rarest and most perfect enjoyment," again writes Alaska's vivid interpreter, Miss Scidmore: "The grandest objects in Nature were before us, the primeval forces that mould the face of the earth { 207} were at work, and it was all so out of the every-day world that we might have been walking a new planet, fresh fallen from the Creator's hand." The Taku Glacier has a sheer, precipitous front three hundred feet high, the colour making it seem one gigantic sapphire, so intense is the blue. Yet again there are glints of green and rose and gold that flash out as if a casket of jewels had been flung over it, or an avalanche of star-dust, windswept, from the far spaces of the universe. John Muir, the great naturalist, whose vision was that of the artist and whose spirit was always open to the message of the eternal world, was deeply impressed by Taku and by Sundum fiords, and in one allusion he says of Taku:
"A hundred or more glaciers of the second and third class may be seen along these walls, and as many snowy cataracts, which, with the plunging bergs, keep all the fiord in a roar. The scenery is of the wildest description, especially in their upper reaches, where the granite walls, streaked with waterfalls, rise in sheer massive precipices, like those of Yosemite Valley, to a height of three and four thousand feet."