CHAPTER IV

THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIERS

It was now neck-or-nothing with the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers picture. Having already been out much longer than we had expected to be, there were left only provisions for two days. Nixon had suggested making a hurried trip out and bringing in fresh supplies, but as the time set by Chester for his arrival for the Big Bend trip was already past, I did not feel warranted in prolonging the present jaunt any further. If the morrow was fair all would be well; if not, the main object of our trip would be defeated.

By great good luck the clear weather held. There was not a cloud hovering above the mountains at daybreak the following morning, and we got away for an early start to make the most of our opportunity. Nixon himself had run and cut out the trail to the Lake earlier in the summer, but horses had never been taken over it. Though it was extremely steep in pitches, our maiden passage was marked with few difficulties. Much to Nixon's surprise and satisfaction, only one big dead-fall had been thrown down to block the way, and our enforced halt here gave Roos the opportunity for a very effective "trail shot." He also got some striking "back-lighting stuff" at spots along the interminable cascade that was tumbling and bounding beside the trail. The elevation of our camp on the creek was something like six thousand feet, and that of the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers a bit under eight thousand. The trail is between three and four miles long, and we were rather over two hours in making the climb. There were several halts out of this; steady plugging would do it much quicker.

Timber-line was passed half a mile below the lake, the last of the trees being left behind in a wonderful little mountain park studded with gnarled pines and still bright with late wild flowers. The autumn colouring here was a marvellous chromatic revel in dull golds and soft, subdued browns--the shedding tamaracks and the dying meadow grasses.

Clambering on foot up a steep-sided hillock that appeared to be an ancient glacial moraine augmented by many slides, we suddenly found ourselves on the edge of the high-water level of the lake. The transition from the flower-strewn meadow to a region of almost Arctic frigidity was practically instantaneous--the matter of a half dozen steps. One moment we were climbing in a cliff-walled valley, with rocky buttresses and pinnacles soaring for thousands of feet on either side, and with brown-black gravel and thinning brown-grey bunch grass under foot and ahead; the next, as we gained the crest of the old terminal moraine, the landscape opened up with a blinding flash and we were gazing at a sparkling emerald lake clipped in the embrace of an amphitheatre of glaciers and eternal snow, and floating full of icebergs and marble-mottled shadows. The "Hanging Glacier"--perhaps a mile wide across its face, and rearing a solid wall of ice a couple of hundred feet in the sheer--closed the further or southeastern end of the lake. Behind the glacier was a cliff of two thousand feet or more in height. It appeared to be almost solid ice and snow, but must have been heavily underlaid with native rock to maintain its abruptness as it did. Higher still a snow-cap, bright and smooth as polished marble, extended to the crest of the range and formed a glittering line against the cobalt of the sky. Of all the scenic gems of the North American continent, I recall none which is so well entitled to the characterization of "unique" as this white-flaming little jewel of the high Selkirks.

The lake was now rapidly receding to its winter low-water level, and to reach its brink we had to press on across three hundred yards of black boulders which were evidently covered in the time of the late spring floods. Ordinarily one would have expected the worst kind of rough and slippery walking here, but, to my great surprise, the great rocks were set as solid and as level as a pavement of mosaic. The reason for this became plain when we approached the water, where a flotilla of small icebergs, rising and falling to the waves kicked up by the brisk breeze drawing down the lake, were steadily thump-thumping the bottom with dull heavy blows which could be felt underfoot a hundred yards away. This natural tamping, going on incessantly during the months of high-water, was responsible for the surprising smoothness of the rocky waste uncovered by the winter recession. The great boulders had literally been hammered flat.

The icebergs, which were formed by the cracking off of the face of the great glacier filled half of the lake. They varied in size from almost totally submerged chunks a few feet in diameter to huge floating islands of several hundred. They were of the most fantastic shapes, especially those which had been longest adrift and therefore most exposed to the capricious action of the sun. By and large, the effect was that of a Gargantuan bowl sprinkled with puffy white popcorn. But if one took his time and searched carefully enough there were very few things of heaven or earth that were not represented in the amazing collection. One berg, floating on another, had been reduced by the sun to the seeming of a gigantic view camera--box, bellows and lens. A number of famous groups of statuary were there, but of course very much in the rough. "The Thinker" was perhaps the best of these, but even Rodin would have wanted to do a bit more "finishing" on the glacial cave-man humped up on his icy green pedestal. Roos, who had never heard of Rodin, said it reminded him of me drying out after my shower-bath in the ice-cave. His facile imagination also discovered something else. He had once seen a picture of "Lohengrin's Farewell" in a Victrola record price-list, and there was a much sun-licked hunk of ice, very near the shore, which suggested the barge to him, swans and all. I saw the barge all right, but the Pegasus of my imagination had to have some spurring before he would take the "swan" hurdle.

It was Roos' idea that I should swim off, clamber over the side of the barge, lassoo the "near" swan with a piece of pack-rope to represent reins, and let him shoot me as "Lohengrin." It wouldn't exactly run into the "continuity" of the "sportsman" picture, he admitted; but he thought that Chester might use it, with a lot of other odds and ends, under some such title as "Queer People in Queer Places." The idea appealed to me strongly. "Lohengrin's Farewell" had always moved me strangely; and here was a chance actually to appear in the classic rôle! "You bet I'll do it," I assented readily. "What shall I wear?" The "Shining Armour," which we both seemed to connect with "Lohengrin," happened to be one of the things not brought up in our saddle-bags that morning. We were in a hot discussion as to the best manner of improvising a helmet and cuirass out of condensed milk and sardine tins, when Nixon, asking if we knew that the sun only shone about three hours a day in that "_geesly_ crack in the hills," dryly opined that we should take our pictures of the lake while there was plenty of light. That sounded sensible, and we started feverishly to hurry through with the routine grind so as to be free to do proper justice to "Lohengrin." As Fate would have it, however, that which was presently revealed to me of the ways of fresh-water icebergs quenched effectually my desire to swim off and take liberties with the capricious things at close quarters.

After making a number of scenic shots, Roos announced that he was ready to go ahead with the "falling iceberg" stuff. As it was quite out of the question making our way along the base of the cliffs on either side of the lake to the face of the glacier in the limited time at our disposal, and, moreover, as we had already demonstrated the impossibility of making artificial icebergs with "sixty per" dynamite, it became necessary to improvise something closer at hand. It was Roos' idea that a piece of cliff cracked off into the lake might produce the effect desired, especially if "cut" with discrimination. "Here's the way it goes," he explained. "The cracked off rock plunks down into the lake right into the middle of a bunch of floating icebergs. I starts cranking at the splash, and with the bergs all rolling about and bumping into each other no one can tell but what it was one of them that really started it. Then I'll pick you up hopping up and down on the bank and registering 'surprise' and 'consternation'; and then follow with a close-up of you standing on that high rock, looking down on the quieting waves with folded arms. Now you register 'relief' and finally a sort of 'awed wonder.' Then you take a big breath and raise your eyes to the face of the glacier. You keep right on registering 'awed wonder' (only more intense) and as I fade you out you shake your head slowly as if the mighty mysteries of Nature were beyond your understanding. Get me? They ought to colour the film for that dark blue in the laboratory (I could tell 'em just the solution to make that ice look cold), and the sub-title ought to be 'The Birth of an Iceberg,' and...."

"Jim's the midwife, is he?" I cut in. "Yes, I get you. Tell him to uncork some of that 'sixty per' 'Twilight Sleep' of his and I'll stand by for the christening."

After a careful technical examination of the terrain, Jim, chief "Powder Monkey," located what he thought was a favourable spot for operations and started to enlarge a thin crack in the cliff to make it take five sticks of dynamite. That was more than half of our remaining stock; but Roos was insisting on a big iceberg, and plenty of powder was the best way to insure success. It must have been the tamping that was at the bottom of the trouble, for moss and damp earth are hardly solid enough to deflect the kick of the dynamite in the desired direction. At any rate, although there was a roaring detonation, the mighty force released was expended outward rather than inward. The face of the cliff hardly shivered, and only an inconsiderable trickle of broken rocks and sand slid down into the lake. Too sore to take more than hostile notice of Nixon's somewhat rough and ready little _mot_ about the "'Birth o' the Iceberg' turning out a _geesly_ miscarriage," Roos clapped the cap over his lens, unscrewed the crank and began taking his camera off its tripod. That rather hasty action was responsible for his missing by a hair what I am certain was the greatest opportunity ever presented to a moving picture operator to film one of the most stupendous of Nature's manifestations.

The roar of the detonating dynamite reverberated for half a minute or more among the cliffs and peaks, and it was just after the last roll had died out that a renewed rumble caused me to direct a searching gaze to the great wall of ice and snow that towered above the farther end of the lake. For an instant I could not believe my eyes. It could not be possible that the whole mountainside was toppling over! And yet that was decidedly the effect at a first glance. From the rim of the snow-cap down to the back of the glacier--a mile wide and two thousand feet high--there was one solid, unbroken Niagara of glittering, coruscant ice and snow. Like a curtain strung with diamonds and pearls and opals it streamed, while the shower of flaming colours was reflected in the quivering waters of the lake in fluttering scarves of sun-shot scarlet, in tenuous ribbons of lavender, jade and primrose. It was only when the last shreds of this marvellous banner had ceased to stream (at the end of thirty or forty seconds perhaps) that I saw what it was that had caused it. The whole hair-poised brink of the great snow-cap--sharply jolted, doubtless, by the explosion of the dynamite--had cracked away and precipitated itself to the glacier level, nearly half a mile below. The shock to the latter appeared to have had the effect of jarring it sufficiently to crack down great blocks all along its face. The glacier had, in fact, been shocked into giving birth to a whole litter of real icebergs where, nearer at hand, we had failed dismally in our efforts to incubate even an artificial one. As glacial obstetricians it appeared that we still had much to learn.

Roos made a great effort to get his camera set up again in time to make it record something of the wonderful spectacle. He was just too late, however. Only a few thin trickles of snow were streaking the face of the cliff when he finally swung his powerful tele-photo lens upon it, and even these had ceased before he had found his focus. It was no end of a pity. I saw several of the great _valangas_ started by the Austrian and Italian artillery in the Dolomites, and, previous to that, what I had thought were very considerable slides on Aconcagua and Chimborazi, in the Andes, and on Kinchinjunga and among the hanging ice-fields above the Zoji-la in the Himalayas. But any half dozen of the greatest of these would have been lost in that mighty avalanche of ice and snow that we saw descend above the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. Nixon, with a lifetime spent in the Selkirks and Rockies, said he had never seen anything to compare with it.

Jim, reporting that he still had three sticks of dynamite in hand, said he reckoned there might be a better chance of starting an "iceberg" on the southern side of the lake than on the northern one, where we had failed to accomplish anything. The southern slope was even more precipitous than the northern, he pointed out, and he had his eye on a rock which looked as if a charge might turn it over and start it rolling. "You never can tell what you may be startin' among a bunch o' tiltin' rocks like them 'uns," he said hopefully. Nixon's muttered "That ain't no _geesly_ hooch dream" might have meant several things; but I took it that he intended to imply that there was too much "unstable equilibrium" along that southern shore to make it the sort of a place that a neurasthenic would seek out for a rest cure. I felt the same way about it, only more so; but Roos' disappointment over what he had already missed was so keen that neither of us had the heart to interpose any objections when he told Jim to go ahead and see what he could do. As two sticks of dynamite were already promised to Harmon, the trick, if it came off, would have to be pulled with one. Spitting tobacco juice on the taffy-like cylinder for luck, Jim clambered off up the cliff and planted it under his "likely rock," Roos meantime setting up in a favourable position below.

Whether Jim's "tobaccanalian libation" had anything to do with it or not, this time luck was with us. The sharp blast kicked Jim's rock up on one ear, where it teetered for a second or two indecisively before rolling over sidewise and coming down kerplump on a huge twenty-ton cube of basalt that no one would have thought of moving with a barrel of giant. It wasn't so much what the little rock did as the way it did it. The big block gave a sort of a quiver, much as a man awakening from a doze would stretch his arms and yawn, and when it quivered a lot of loose stuff slipped away from beneath and just let it go. It lumbered along at an easy roll for a bit, and then increased its speed and started jumping. Its first jump was no more than a nervous little hop that served to hurdle it clear of a length of flat ledge that reached out to stop its downward progress. A second later it had hit its stride, so that when it struck the water there had been nothing but rarefied air trying to stop it for two hundred feet. Down it went, pushing a column of compressed _aqua pura_ ahead of it and sucking a big black hole along in its wake. It was when that column of compressed water spouted up again and tried to chase its tail down the hole it had come out of that things began to happen, for it found something like a dozen fat icebergs crowding in and trying to insinuate their translucent bulks into the same opening. And of course they made a tremendous fuss about it. When an iceberg found that it couldn't get in standing up, it forthwith lay down on its side, or even rolled over on its back; which didn't help it in the least after all, for the very good reason that all the other icebergs were adopting the same tactics. And so Roos, who was cranking steadily all the time, got his "Birth of an Iceberg" picture after all.

When the bergs ceased butting their heads off against each other Roos shot me in the scenes where I registered "consternation," "relief" and "awed wonder," and our hard-striven-for Lake of the Hanging Glaciers picture was complete. There was just a bit of a hitch at the "awed wonder" fade-out, though, but that was Roos' fault in trying to introduce a "human touch" by trying to make Gordon's dog perch up beside me on the crest of a hatchet-edged rock. The pup sat quietly wagging his tail until the moment came for me to lift up mine eyes unto the hills and increase the tenseness of my "awed wonder" registration. Then the altitude began to affect his nerves and he started doing figure "8's" back and forth between my precariously planted feet. As a natural consequence, when Roos started in on his "fade-out" I was seesawing my arms wildly to maintain my balance, talking volubly, and registering--well, what would a temperamental movie star be registering while in the act of telling a dog and a man what he thought of them for their joint responsibility in all but pitching him off a twenty-foot-high rock into a vortex of tumbling icebergs? Again (unless this part of the film has been discreetly cut in the studio before exhibition) I beg the indulgence of lip-readers.

The lake was deeply shadowed before we were finally at liberty to take up again the sartorics of "Lohengrin"; but it was not that fact, nor yet the not entirely prohibitive difficulty of making shining armour out of tin cans, that nipped that classic conception in the bud. Rather it was the astonishing unstable-mindedness displayed by the bergs when impinged upon from without. Of the hundred or more hunks of floating ice within a five-hundred-yard radius of the point where our artificial berg had hit the water, only a half dozen or so of the broadest and flattest continued to expose the same profiles they had presented before the big splash. Most of the others had turned over and over repeatedly, and one, which seemed to "hang" in almost perfect balance, continued slowly revolving like a patent churn. "Lohengrin's Barge," half a mile distant from the heart of the "birth splash" and lapped by but the lightest of expiring waves, was rolling drunkenly to port and starboard as though in the trough of the seas of a typhoon. It looked ready to turn turtle at a touch, and there were too many angular projections on it--especially about the "swans"--to make even a man who aspired to grand opera care to court lightly the experience of tangling himself up in the wreck.

Descending to the timber-line meadow where the horses had been left, we found Harmon had brought up his outfit and pitched his tent midway of an enchanting vista framed in green-black pines and golden tamaracks, and with a wonderful background for "camp shots" both up and down the valley. There he was going to make his base, he said, until he found just the light he wanted on the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. Then he hoped to get at least a negative or two that would do something approaching justice to so inspiring a subject. And there, working and waiting patiently through an almost unbroken succession of storms that raged in the high Selkirks for many days, he held on until he got what he wanted. It was in that quiet persistent way that he had been photographing the mountains of the Canadian West for many years, and it will be in that way that he will continue until he shall have attained somewhere near to the high goal he has set for his life's work--a complete photographic record of the Rockies and Selkirks. It is a privilege to have met an artist who works with so fine a spirit, who has set himself so high an ideal. A number of Harmon's scenic pictures of the mountains where the Columbia takes its rise are so much better than the best of my own of the same subjects, that I am giving them place in a work which it was my original intention to illustrate entirely myself.

We returned to our camp at the head of Horse Thief Creek that night, and set out on our return to Windermere the following morning. Save for a rather sloppy passage of the main ford, the journey was without incident. With light packs, we pushed right through to the head of the wagon-road--something over thirty miles--the first day. The seventeen miles to Invermere we covered in a leisurely fashion, reaching the hotel at three in the afternoon of the following day, Sunday, the twentieth of September. Here I found a wire from Chester, stating that it had finally proved impossible for him to get away from business, and asking me to go ahead and see the Big Bend trip through without him. In the event I decided to continue on down the river he would be glad to have his cameraman accompany me as long as the weather and light were favourable for his work. A letter with full instructions covering the two pictures he desired made had already been dispatched.