This superb elevation was itself broken up into radiating chasms, whose rocky sides rose in black keels of relief above the snow filled gorges they defined, while surmounting them all a keen shaft of granite, roseate in a hundred lights, or wrapped in pendulous and waving veils of mist, climbed steeply to the clouds.
The crowded and crushed snow masses, nevé-like emerged upon all the lower shoulders of the huge crest in glacial fields of ice. Here their Arctic currents, sweeping around the lower summits, were reinforced by new accessions, springing from these lesser altitudes, which in confusion poured upon them, and by many avenues of obstruction and accidents of interference, repulse and rupture, converted the great multiplied ice zone, encircling the whole congery of peaks, and plunging outward over vertical escarpments to lower levels, into a stupendous spectacle of chaos. Icebergs crossed their pinnacles in the descent, the riven ice stream ejected blocks of ice hundreds of feet in length, and the split glacier, seamed by colossal cleavages to the abysses of its rocky floor, displayed its green depths. Detonations rose upon the air, caught by the waiting winds and drifted southward over the wild plains, the long indented coast and the far interior canons; south to forest lands and waving grass savannahs, while near at hand its rough roar startled the sleeping mastodon and brought terror to men.
From this glory, which in the Sun of that strange day shone like a titanic crown of jewels, the land areas fell suddenly away, and expanded southward into a long sea margin on the west, and arid and rocky wildernesses on the east, where deep canyons with vertical walls, a thousand feet high, held in their dark bosoms the frigid waters from the northern glaciers. An intermediate region, between the palisaded or tenuous coast-line and these mysterious untenanted rents and time, wind and water worn ravines, revealed scenes more mild and radiant, wherein the apparel of nature was more colored, and where she bore those features of appropriate beauty where river and lake, forest land and flowered field unite in their abundance to appeal to the hearts of men.
This hospitable land was varied. It slowly liberated itself, like an escaping captive, from the desolation of the East, where the plains were broken with chilled lava beds, jagged peaks, asperities of stone, standing like geologic spectres, canyons holding emprisoned and viewless rivers, wide and gloomy lakes around whose margins the struggling relics of an extinct flora seemed slowly confessing their defeat before phases of climate less lenient than their predecessors. It freed itself from broad depressions, the beds of ancient lakes swept by freezing winds from the northern ice country, and bare and empty, exposing to the sky their orb-like circumference, ghastly with white alkaline encrustation, like the pallid optic of a great leviathan, whitened with the films of decomposition.