Fresh Big Ice Wave Now On.

But one is most impressed by witnessing evidences of the mighty forces which have been at work when the ice-stream, acting under periodical accumulations of snow in the mountains, has been in flood, rising in great billows which have swept the lower portions of the mountain walls clear of all vegetation for heights of hundreds of feet. This is particularly noticeable on the left, or Eastern wall, below page 53 Roberts Point (2,034 feet), where parties clamber up and along the rock face to avoid the passage through the first ice-falls, and then go out on to the ice again to cross over to Cape Defiance. Here, in the unrecorded past, estimated at about 150 years ago, a stupendous ice-wave rose 400 feet from the normal level and carried all before it, stripping the rock completely bare, and cutting it as though by a huge chisel. The vegetation has grown again and in successive rises of the ice, none of them so high as the big one torn away again only to renew itself afresh. So the battle between ice and vegetation goes on.

During the past sixty years there have been two great swellings, the last of which, twenty years ago, cleared away the gallery erected some 200 feet above the usual level of the ice for the convenience of tourists. Two years ago Mr. Arthur P. Harper, President of the New Zealand Alpine Club, and one of the foremost authorities on the subject of the Franz Josef Glacier, predicted that another wave was now due, and his forecast has been so accurately fulfilled that Mr. Peter Graham, the celebrated alpine guide, states that this wave is now on, the ice being at least 100 feet higher than usual with the climax yet to come. “Vegetation,” he says, “which has grown within the last twenty years, is now being carried away, and the present wave will go on probably for another two years.”