In some of the reaches, where there is a free margin,
we may walk through them. Small skylights appearing here and there,
these tunnels are not very dark. The roaring river fills all the arching
way with impressively loud reverberating music, which is sweetened at
times by the ouzel, a bird that is not afraid to go wherever a stream
may go, and to sing wherever a stream sings.
All the small alpine pools and lakelets are in like manner obliterated
from the winter landscapes, either by being first frozen and then
covered by snow, or by being filled in by avalanches. The first
avalanche of the season shot into a lake basin may perhaps find the
surface frozen. Then there is a grand crashing of breaking ice and
dashing of waves mingled with the low, deep booming of the avalanche.
Detached masses of the invading snow, mixed with fragments of ice, drift
about in sludgy, island-like heaps, while the main body of it forms a
talus with its base wholly or in part resting on the bottom of the
basin, as controlled by its depth and the size of the avalanche. The
next avalanche, of course, encroaches still farther, and so on with each
in succession until the entire basin may be filled and its water sponged
up or displaced.
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