Wonderland or Alaska and the Inside Passage Part 8

"I cite this incident, as it is more descriptive, and gives a better idea of contrast than anything of my own could do, giving, as it does, to the reader, a conception of the vastness and immensity of the topographical aspect of the sh.o.r.es of the inland seas through whose labyrinthine pa.s.sages we have for ten days past, and for ten days more to come will be lost to the outside world, where nature reigns undisturbed and unfretted by the hand of civilization."

Here, under the solemn influence of Mount St. Elias, and in the northernmost waters of the greatest ocean of our planet, we turn southward to repeat in inverse order the things we have seen; or perchance, as often happens, down a number of new channels, with their varied scenery, before home is reached again.

I have given a certain order in which the few ports of Alaska are visited; but the reader must not for a moment think that this is always rigidly followed. Sometimes some of them are left for the return journey, and much depends on the amount of freight, and the number and character of pa.s.sengers. In the winter the trips are made wholly with reference to mails, freight, and the few pa.s.sengers; but in the spring, summer, and fall these are wholly subordinate, and the trips are converted into excursions in the broadest sense of the word. While thousands of little channels remain almost wholly unexplored, which probably would make the fortune of excursion companies if transported elsewhere, yet it is evident that the greater attractions of the great inland pa.s.sage have been discovered, and are now shown to the tourists to the Wonderland of the World.

FRED'K SCHWATKA.