No. 53 was still the only bed disengaged, for it was very late when I reached Berne; but on my vehement protestations against that unquiet chamber, the landlord most obligingly converted a sofa in his own sitting-room into a temporary bed, and made it over to me. This room was separated by a door of ground-glass from another sitting-room brilliantly lighted, in which a number of German young gentlemen were feting the return of a comrade after the national manner. The landlord said he thought it must soon be over, for he doubted whether they could last much longer; but their powers of endurance were greater than he had supposed. It will readily be imagined that German songs with a good chorus, the solo parts being very short, and received with the utmost impatience by the chorus, were even less soporific in their effect than the flirtations—though boisterous beyond all conventional propriety—of German housemaids and waiters.[65]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 55: See p. 258.]

[Footnote 56: Acta SS. Bolland. May 9.—If possessed of the characteristics of his race—'tall and proud'—his activity belies the first line of the old saying,

'Lang and lazy, Little and loud; Red and foolish, Black and proud:'

though possibly the personal habits which a modern spirit loves to point out, as the great essential of hermit-life, united with the family characteristic of the early Seton to verify the last line of the saying.]

[Footnote 57: Bibl. Univ. de Geneve, First Series, xxi. 113. See also Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, viii. 290.]

[Footnote 58: Philosophical Magazine, Aug. 1829.]

[Footnote 59: Colonel Dufour guessed the elevation of the cave, in 1822, at two-thirds the height of the Niesen, and forty years after, as General Dufour, he published the result of the scientific survey of Switzerland, which makes it 1,780 metres; so that his early guess was not a bad one.]

[Footnote 60: There is a hint of something of this kind in an editorial note in the Journal des Mines (now Annales des Mines) of Prairial, an. iv. pp. 71, 72, in connection with the glaciere near Besancon.]

[Footnote 61: M. Soret, who visited the Schafloch in September 1860, and communicated his notes to M. Thury, speaks of many columns in this part of the glaciere, where we found only two. 'L'un d'entre eux,' he says, 'presentait dans sa partie inferieure une petite grotte ou cavite, assez grande pour qu'un homme put y entrer en se courbant.']

[Footnote 62: See also the note at the end of this chapter.]

[Footnote 63: 'Toute la couche superieure au plan de niveau passant par le seuil etait chargee de brouillard; toute la couche inferieure a ce niveau etait parfaitement limpide.' (Thury, p. 37.)]

[Footnote 64: Respectively, 32 deg..666, 36 deg..266, and 32 deg., Fahrenheit.]

[Footnote 65: Since I wrote this chapter, my attention has been called to a tourist's account of the Schafloch in Once a Week (Nov. 26, 1864), in an article called An Ice-cavern in the Justis-Thal. The writer says—'We proceeded to the farther end of the cavern, or at least as far as we thought it prudent, to ascertain where the flooring of ice rounded off into the abyss of unfathomable water we heard trickling below.' One of the party 'having taken some large stones with him, he began hurling them into the profound mystery. Presently a heavy double-bass gurgle issued forth with ominous depth of voice, indicating the danger of farther progress. Having thus ascertained that if either of us ventured farther he would most probably not return by the way he went, the signal of retreat was given, and in about forty minutes, after encountering the same amusing difficulties which had enlivened our descent, AEneas-like we gained the upper air.' It will be seen from my account of what we found in the 'abyss of unfathomable water,' that a little farther exploration might have effected a change in the writer's views.]

* * * * *



CHAPTER X.

THE GLACIERE OF GRAND ANU, ON THE MONTAGNE DE L'EAU, NEAR ANNECY.

M. Thury's list contained a bare mention of two glacieres on the M. Parmelan, near Annecy, without any further information respecting them, beyond the fact that they supplied ice for Lyons. Their existence had been apparently reported to him by M. Alphonse Favre, but he had obtained no account of a visit to the caves. Under these circumstances, the only plan was to go to Annecy, and trust to chance for finding some one there who could assist me in my search.

After spending a day or two in the library at Geneva, looking up M. Thury's references, with respect to various ice-caves, and trying to discover something more than he had found in the books there, I started for Annecy at seven in the morning in the banquette of the diligence. On a fresher day, no doubt the great richness of the orchards and corn-fields would have been very striking; but on this particular morning the fields were already trembling with heat, and the trees and the fruit covered with dust; and there was nothing in the grouping of the country through which the road lay to refresh the baked and half-choked traveller. The voyage was to last four and a half hours, and it soon became a serious question how far it would be possible to face the heat of noon, when the earlier morning was so utterly unbearable.

Before very long, a counter-irritant appeared in the shape of a fellow-traveller, whose luggage consisted of a stick and an old pair of boots. The man was not pleasant to be near in any way, and he was evidently not at all satisfied with the amount of room I allowed him. He kept discontentedly and doggedly pushing his spare pair of boots farther and farther into my two-thirds of the seat, and once or twice was on the point of a protest, in which case I was prepared to tell him that as he filled the whole banquette with his smell, he ought in reason to be satisfied with less room for himself; but instead of speaking, he brought out a tobacconist's parcel and began to open it. Tobacco-smoke is all very well under suitable circumstances, but it is possible to be too hot and dusty and bilious to be able to stand it, and I watched his proceedings with more of annoyance than of resignation. The parcel turned out, however, to be delightful snuff, tastefully perfumed and very refreshing; and the politeness with which the owner gave a pinch to the foreign monsieur, after apportioning a handful to the driver and conductor, won him a good three inches more of seat. The inevitable cigar soon came; but it was a very good one, and no one could complain: all the same, I could not help feeling a malicious satisfaction when the douaniers on the French frontier investigated the spare boots—guiltless, one might have thought, of anything except the extremity of age and dirt—and drew from them a bundle or two of smuggled cigars, the owner trying in vain to look as if he rather liked it.

The Hotel de Geneve is probably the least objectionable of the hotels of Annecy; but the Poste-bureau is at the Hotel d'Angleterre, and it was much too hot for me to fight with the waiters there, and carry off my knapsack to another house. It is generally a mistake—a great mistake—to sleep at a house which is the starting-place and the goal of many diligences. All the night through, whips are cracking, bells jingling, and men are shouting hoarsely or blowing hoarser horns. Moreover, the Hotel d'Angleterre had apparently needed a fresh coat of paint and universal papering for many years, and the latter need had at this crisis been so far grappled with that the old paper had been torn down from the walls and now lay on the various floors, while large pies of malodorous sizing had been planted at the angles of the stairs. The natural salle-a-manger was evidently an excellent room, with oleander balconies, but it was at present in the hands of joiners, and a card pointed the way to the 'provisionary salle-a-manger'—not a bad name for it—in the neighbourhood of the kitchen.

There was one redeeming feature. The people of the house were nice-looking and well-dressed. But experience has taught me to view such a phenomenon in French towns of humbler rank with somewhat mixed feelings. When the house is superintended with a keen and watchful eye by a young lady of fashionable appearance, who takes a personal interest in a solitary traveller, and suggests an evening's course on the lake, or a morning's drive to some good view, and makes herself most winning and agreeable; who takes the words, moreover, out of the mouth of a man meditating an ordinary dinner, and assures him that she knows exactly what he wants, and he shall be well satisfied, with a sisterly air that makes the idea of francs and sous not sordid only, but impossible; I have slowly learned to expect that this fashion and condescension will appear in the bill. Prettiness is a very expensive item in such a case; and as these three were all combined to a somewhat remarkable degree at the Hotel d'Angleterre, the eventual bill made me angry, and I should certainly try the Hotel de Geneve on any future visit to Annecy.

The first thing to be done was to determine the position of the Mont Parmelan. I was prepared to find the people of the town denying the existence of such a mountain; but, as it was visible from the door of the hotel, they could not go quite so far as that. The small crowd at the door repudiated the glacieres with one voice, and pointed out how unlikely it was that Lyons should be supplied with ice from Annecy; nevertheless, I continued to ask my way in spite of protestation, till at length a lame man passed by, who said monsieur was quite right—he himself knew two glacieres on the Mont Parmelan very well. He had never seen either of them, but he knew them as well as if he had. It was useless to go to them now, he added, for the owners extracted all the ice early in the year, and stored it in holes in the lower part of the mountain. He had no idea by what route they were to be approached from Annecy, or on which side of the Mont Parmelan they lay.

I now looked on the local map, and determined that the best plan would be to take the Bonneville diligence as far as Charvonnaz, the point on the road which seemed to lie nearest to the roots of the Mont Parmelan, and then be guided by what I might learn among the peasants. Everyone said there was no chance of getting to anything by that means; but as the hotel people saw that it was of no use to deny the glacieres any longer, they proposed to take me to a man who knew the M. Parmelan well, and could tell me all about it. This man proved to be a keeper of voitures,—an ominous profession under the circumstances,—and he assured me that I could make a most lovely course the next day, through scenery of unrivalled beauty; and he eloquently told on his fingers the villages and sights I should come to. I suggested—without in the least knowing that it was so—that the drive might be all very well in itself, but it would not bring me to the glacieres; on which he assured me that he knew every inch of the mountain, and there was not such a thing as a glaciere in the whole district. At this moment, a gentlemanlike man was brought up by the waiter, and introduced to me as a monsieur who knew a monsieur who knew the proprietor of one of the glacieres, and would he happy to conduct me to this second monsieur: so, without any very ceremonious farewell to the owner of the proffered voiture, we marched off together down the street, and eventually turned into a cafe, whose master was the monsieur for whom we were in search. Know the glaciere?—yes, indeed! he had ice from it one year every morning. His wife and he had made a course to the campagne of M. the Maire of Aviernoz, and he—the cafetier—had descended for miles, as it were, down and down, till he came to an underground world of ice, wonderful, totally wonderful: there he perceived so immense a cold, that he drank a bottle of rhoom—a whole bottle—and drank it from the neck, a l'Anglaise. And when they had gone so far that great dread came upon them, they rolled a stone down the ice, and it went into the darkness—boom, boom, boom,—and he put on a power of ventriloquism which admirably represented the strange suggestive sound. Hold a moment! had monsieur a crayon? Yes, monsieur had; so the things were impetuously swept off a round marble table, and the excited little man drew a fancy portrait of the glaciere. The way to reach it? Go by diligence to Charvonnaz—exactly what I had determined upon—and walk up to Aviernoz, where his good friend the maire would make me see his beautiful glaciere, through the means of a letter which he went to write. It was absurd to see this hot little man sign himself 'Dugravel, glacier,' that being the style of his profession, naturally recalling the contradictory conduct of the Latin noun lucus.

The bones of S. Francis of Sales lie in the church of S. Francois in Annecy, and I made a pilgrimage in search of them through very unpleasant streets. After a time, the Italian west front of the church appeared; but the main door led into a demonstrative bakery, and the door of the north aisle was obscured by oleanders and a striped awning, and over it appeared the legend, 'Entree de l'Hotel.' As a man politely explained, they had built S. Francis another church, and utilised the old one. The town itself seemed to be of the squalid style of antiquity—old, no doubt, but very dirty. It is pervaded by streams, which crop up among the houses, and flow through dark alleys and vaulted passages, rarely coming into daylight, and suggesting all manner of dark crimes. The red-legged French kettledrums are, if possible, more insolent here than in other places, and it is evident that the dogs are not yet reconciled to the annexation, for the guard swept through the streets amid a perfect tornado of howls from the negligent scavengers of the place. For my own part, I was not pleased with the change of rule, when I found that since Annecy has become French, the vin d'Asti has become dear, as being now a foreign wine.

The diligence for Bonneville was to leave Annecy at half-past four in the morning; so I told them to call me at four, intending to breakfast somewhere on the way. But of course, when four o'clock came, I had to call myself, and in a quarter of an hour a knock at the door announced half-past four. I pounced upon the man, and remonstrated with him, but he assured me it did not matter; and when I reminded him that the diligence was to leave at half-past four, he observed philosophically that it was quite true, and I had better make haste, for the poste was very punctual. At the door of the bureau a loaded diligence stood, marked Annecy—Aix, and I asked had the Bonneville diligence gone? It did not go till six, the clerk told me; but I reminded him he had said half-past four when I asked him last night. Half-past four?—true, here was the carriage standing at the door. But that was for Aix, not Bonneville, I pointed out to him. Pardon—it was marked Aix, but was in fact meant for Bonneville.

The diligence reached the end of the by-road leading to Villaz in about half an hour, and all the fever of Geneva and Annecy seemed to fly away before the freshness of this green little lane, with clematis in full flower pervading the hedges, and huge clusters of young nuts peeping out, and promising later delights to fortunate passers-by. But, alas! the little lane soon came to an end, and as I faced the fields of corn up the mountain-side, the hot thunderous air came rolling down in palpable billows, and oppressive clouds took possession of the surrounding hills. Three-quarters of an hour brought me to Villaz, a close collection of houses on the hill-side, with arched stone gateways leading into the farmyards,—a fortified style of agricultural building which seems to prevail in that district. After an amount of experience in out-of-the-way places which makes me very cautious in saying that one in particular is dirtier than a dozen others, I venture to say that the auberge of Villaz is the most squalid I have come across; and I would not feed there again, except in very robust health, even for a new glaciere. Still, it was absolutely necessary to eat something, and the landlady promised coffee and bread. She showed me first into the kitchen; but as it was also the place where the domestics slept, with many quadrupeds, I declined to sit there. Upon this she led me to the salon, where the window resisted all our efforts for some little time, and then opened upon such a choice assortment of abominations, that I fled without my baggage. The next attempt she made was the one remaining room of the house, the family bedroom; but that was so much worse than all, that I took final refuge on the balcony, a sort of ante-room to the hen-house. The cocks at the auberge of Villaz are the loudest, the hens the most talkative, and the cats the most shaggy and presuming, I have ever met with. Even here, however, all was not unmitigated darkness; for they ground the coffee while the water was boiling, and the consequent decoction was admirable. Moreover, the bread had a skin of such thickness and impervious toughness, that the inside was presumably clean.

Aviernoz lay about an hour farther. Almost as soon as I left Villaz, the thunderstorm came on in earnest, with sheets of rain, a regular Wolkenbruch.[66] The rain was most refreshing; but lightning is not a pleasant companion in presence of a bright ice-axe, and I was glad when the houses of Aviernoz came in sight. The village had the appearance of being lost; and the houses were scattered about so irregularly, that it was difficult to know which was the best point to make for. The road studiously avoided the scattered houses, and the Mairie seemed especially difficult to find. When at length it was found, the maire, like the queen in the poets, was in the kitchen; and he sat affably on the end of a bench and read the letter of introduction aloud, asking me, at the conclusion, how was our friend Dugravel, a man amazing in many ways. When I confessed that I had only made the acquaintance of the amazing man the night before, and therefore did not feel competent to give any reliable account of the state of his health, beyond the fact that he seemed to be in excellent spirits, the maire looked upon me evidently with great respect, as having won so far upon a great character like Dugravel in so short a time, and determined to accompany me himself. Meantime, we must drink some kirsch. The maire was a young man, spare and vehement. He talked with a headlong impetuosity which caused him to be always hot, and his hair limp and errant; and at the end of each sentence there were so many laggard halves of words to come out together, with so little breath to bring them out, that he eventuated in a stuttering scream. His clothes were of such a description, that the most speculative Israelite would not have gone beyond copper for his wardrobe, all standing. There were two women in the house, to whom he was exceedingly imperious: one of them received his orders and his vehemence with a certain amount of defiance, but the other was subdued and obedient, and I believe her to have been the mayoress. He poured himself and his household at my feet, knocked a child one way and his wife another, and, from the air with which he dragged off the tablecloth they had laid, and ordered a better, and swept away the glasses because they were not clean enough—which in itself was sufficiently true,—and screamed for poached eggs for monsieur, and then impetuously ate them himself—I fancy that he might have been taught to play Petrucio with success.

When we had sat for a quarter of an hour or so, a heavy-looking young man, in fustian clothes and last year's linen, came into the room, and was introduced as the communal schoolmaster. We shook hands with much impressment on the strength of the similarity of our professions, and the maire explained that the new arrival acted also as his secretary, for there was really so much writing to be done that it was beyond his own powers; and as the schoolmaster lived en pension at the Mairie, it was very convenient. M. Rosset, the schoolmaster, stated that he had heard us, as he sat in his room, talking of the proposed visit to the glaciere, and he should much wish to accompany us. We both expressed the warmest satisfaction; but the maire suggested—how about the boys? That, M. Rosset said, was simple enough. The world would go to the school at nine o'clock, and, finding no schoolmaster, would go home again, or otherwise employ itself; and he could have school on the weekly holiday, to make up for the lost day. This weekly holiday is universally on Thursday, he said, because that day divides the week so well; and I failed to persuade him that there was a commemoration intended in the choice of that day, as in the observance of Friday and Sunday. The maire utterly refused to take a cord, on the ground that there was no possibility of such a thing being of the least use. Fortunately, I had now my own axe, which in more able hands had mounted more than once Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa, so I had not the usual fight to procure that instrument.

Half an hour from the Mairie, when we had well commenced the steep ascent of the mountain-side, the maire turned suddenly round and exclaimed, 'But the inspector!' Rosset was a sallow man, but he contrived to turn white, while M. Metral (the maire) explained to me that the inspector of schools was to visit Aviernoz that day. The schoolmaster recovered before long, and said he should inform the inspector that a famous savant had come from England, and required that the maire and the instituteur should accompany him to the glaciere, to aid him in making scientific observations. In order that he might have documentary proof to advance, he asked for my card, and made me write on it my college and university in full.

As I have already said, the maire's style of talking required a good deal of breath, and so it was not unnatural that the ascent should reduce him to silence. The schoolmaster talked freely about scholastic affairs, and gave me an account of the ordinary tariff in village schools, though each commune may alter the prices of its school if it please. Under seven years of age, children pay 4 francs a year, or, for shorter periods than a year, at the rate of 75 centimes a month; between seven and thirteen, 6 francs a year, or 1 franc a month; from thirteen to eighteen, 8 francs a year, or 1 f. 50 c. a month. There is the same difficulty in France, of course, as with us, in keeping children at school after they are old enough to earn a few centimes by cattle-keeping; and the Ministry of Education had shortly before addressed questions to every schoolmaster in the country, asking what remedy each could suggest. My present friend had replied, that if the Government would give the education gratis, something might be done; but he had expressed his opinion that nothing short of an actual subsidy to parents of children beyond eight or nine years of age would ensure a general improvement.

Having given me this information, he observed that it was every man's business to learn, though he and I might be teachers also, and therefore he was sure monsieur would pardon him if he asked what those black patches on monsieur's hands might mean,—pointing to certain large areas of Epsom plaster which covered the tokens of many glacieres. When his mind was set at rest as to this phenomenon, the maire called a halt, and took his turn of talking. He began to tell me about himself and his wealth, Rosset backing him up and putting in the most telling parts. He had very extensive property, and the more level parts of it were certainly valuable, consisting of 200 journaux of good arable land: the forests through which we walked were his, and he possessed three montagnes and chalets higher up on the mountain. The glaciere was his own property; and two years ago he had discovered another in the neighbourhood, which he had not since visited. He was assisted in his capacity of maire by twelve councillors—in a larger commune it would have been fifteen—and the council met four times in the year. If it was desirable that they should meet on any other occasion, he must write to the prefect of the arrondissement for permission, specifying the business which they wished to conduct, and to this specified business they must confine themselves entirely. Then he wished to know, had we maires such as he in England? Hereupon I drew a fancy picture of the Lord Mayor of London, receiving the Queen and the Royal Family in general in a friendly way, and giving them a dinner,—which, he observed, must cost a good deal, a great deal. However, he looked round upon his fields and houses and mountains, and seemed to think that he could himself stand a considerable drain upon his purse for the reception of royalty; and possibly he is now anxious that the Emperor should pass that way, during the five years to which the tenure of the mayoralty is restricted. Both of my companions were strong in their French sympathies—the one because under the new rule all communal affairs were so much better organised, the other because a wonderful change for the better had taken place in the government superintendence of schools. Theirs was formerly an odd corner of a kingdom that did not care much about them, and was not homogeneous; it was now an integral part of a well-ordered empire. They confessed that the present state of things cost them much more in taxes, &c., excepting in the upper mountains, where Rosset had a cousin who paid even less than under Sardinian rule.

Of course, we talked a little on Church questions; and they were astonished to hear that I was not only an ecclesiastic, but an ordained priest,—a sort of thing which they had fancied did not exist in the English Church. Rosset said the cures of small communes had about L40 a year, but I must have more than that, or I could not afford to travel so far from home. Had I already said the mass that morning? Had I my robes in the sac I had left at the Mairie? Was the red book they had seen in my hands (Baedeker's Schweiz) a Breviary? They branched off to matters of doctrine, and discussed them warmly; but some things they so accommodatingly understated, and others they stated so fairly, that I was able to tell them they were excellent Anglicans.

Higher up in the forest, we were nearly overwhelmed by a party of charcoal-porters, who came down with their traineaux like a black avalanche. A traineau is nothing more than a wooden sledge, on two runners, which are turned up in front, to the height of a yard, to keep the cargo in its place. In the more level parts the porter is obliged to drag this, but on the steep zigzags its own weight is sufficient to send it down; and here the porter places himself in front, with his back leaning against the sacks of charcoal and the turned-up runners, and the whole mass descends headlong, the man's legs going at a wild pace, and now one foot, now the other, steering a judicious course at the turns of the zigzags. The charcoal is made by Italians, who live on polenta and cheese high up in the mountains, and bring their manufacture down to a certain distance, after which the porters take it in charge. The men we saw told us that by hard work they could make four journeys in the day, earning a franc by each; out of which, as they said, they must support stomach and boots, one journey making them ready for a meal, and eight journeys finishing a pair of soles.

It cost us an hour and a half to reach the maire's first chalet, where we were to lunch on such food as the old woman who managed it might have on hand; that is to say, possibly bread, and, beyond that, milk only, in some shape or other. The forms under which milk can be taught to appear are manifold. A young Swiss student, who in the madness of his passion for beetle-hunting had spent fifteen days in a small chalet at Anzeindaz, sleeping each night on the hay,[67] gave me, some time since, a list of the various foods on which he lived and grew fat. The following is the carte, as he arranged it:—

Viandes. Vins.

Du seret. Du lait de vache.[68]

Du caille. Du lait froid.

Du beurre. Du lait de chevre.

Du fromage gras. Petit lait.

Du fromage mi-gras. De la creme.

Du fromage maigre. Du lait de beurre.[69]

Tome de vache. Petit lait de chevre.

Tome de chevre.

Pour les Cochons.

Du lait gate.

Cuite.

Some of the solids and fluids in the earlier part of this carte we felt tolerably sure of finding at the maire's chalet, and accordingly any amount of cream and seret proved to be forthcoming. The maire asserted that cerac was the true name of this recommendable article of food, cere being the patois for the original word. Others had told us that the real word was serre, meaning compressed curds; but the French writers who treat learnedly of cheese-making in the Annales de Chimie adopt the form serets; and in the Annales Scientifiques de l'Auvergne I find both seret and serai, from the Latin serum. There was also bread, which arrived when we were sitting down to our meal: it had been baked in a huge ring, for convenience of carriage, and was brought up from the low-lands on a stick across a boy's shoulder. When the old woman thought it safe to expose a greater dainty to our attacks, at a later period of the meal, she brought out a pot of caille, a delightful luxury which prevails in the form of nuggets of various size floating in sour whey. Owing to a general want of table apparatus, we placed the pot of caille on a broken wall, and speared the nuggets with our pocket-knives.

After the meal, the two Frenchmen found themselves wet and exceedingly cold; for Frenchmen have not yet learned the blessing of flannel shirts under a broiling sun. They set to work to dry themselves after an original fashion. The fire was little more than a collection of smouldering embers, confined within three stone walls about a foot high; so they took each a one-legged stool—chaises des vaches, or chaise des montagnes—and attached themselves to the stools by the usual leathern bands round the hips; then they cautiously planted the prods of the stools in the middle of the embers, maintaining an unstable equilibrium by resting their own legs on the top of the walls. Here they sat, smoking and being smoked, till they were dry and warm. Of course, in case of a slip or an inadvertent movement, they would have gone sprawling into the fire. A well-known Swiss botanist, who has seen many strange sleeping-places in the course of sixty years of flower-hunting in the mountains of Vaud and Valais, has told me that on one occasion he had reached with great difficulty the only chalet in the neighbourhood of his day's researches, at a late hour of the night, the whole mountain being soaked with rain. It was a little upland chalet, which the people had deserted for the autumn and winter; and meantime a mud avalanche had taken possession, and covered the floor to a depth of several inches. No plank was to be found for lying on; but he discovered a broken one-legged stool, and on this he sat and slept, propped as well as might be in a corner. It is difficult to say which would be worse—a fall from the stool by daylight into the embers of a wood fire, or the shuddering slimy waking about midnight, after a nod more vigorous than the rest, to find oneself plunged in eight cold inches of soft mud.

About half an hour beyond the chalet, we found the mouth of the glaciere, on a large plateau almost bare of vegetation, and showing the live rock at the surface. They told me that in a strong winter there would be an average of 12 feet of snow on the ground here.[70] The glaciere itself is approached by descending one side of a deep pit, whose circumference is larger than that of any other of the pit-glacieres I have seen. A few yards off there is a smaller shaft in the rock, which we afterwards found to communicate with the glaciere. The NW. side of the larger pit, being the side at the bottom of which is the arch of entrance, is vertical, and we spent the time necessary for growing cool in measuring the height of this face of rock from above. The plummet ran out 115 feet of string, and struck the slope of snow, down which the descent to the cave must be made, about 6 feet above the junction of the snow with the floor of the glaciere, which was visible from the S. side of the edge of the pit; so that the total depth from the surface of the rock to the ice-floor was 121 feet.



When we were sufficiently cool, we scrambled down the side of the pit opposite to that in which the archway lies, finding the rock extremely steep, and then came to a slope of 72 feet of snow, completely exposed to the weather, which landed us at the mouth of the glaciere. The arch is so large, that we could detect the change of light in the cave, caused by the passage of clouds across the sun, and candles were not necessary, excepting in the pits shortly to be described. We saw at once that rapid thaw was going on somewhere or other; and when we stepped off the snow, we found ourselves in a couple of inches of soft green vegetable mud, like a compote of dark-coloured duckweed—or, to use a more familiar simile, like a mass of overboiled and ill-strained spinach. To the grief of one of us, there was ice under this, of most persuasive slipperiness. The maire said that he had never seen these signs of thaw in his visits in previous years; and as we went farther and farther into the cave, he was more and more surprised at each step to find such a large quantity of running water, and so much less ice than he had expected. The shape of the glaciere is a rough circle, 60 feet in diameter; and the floor, which is solid ice, slopes gradually down to the farther end. The immediate entrance is half-closed by a steep and very regular cone of snow, lying vertically under the small shaft we had seen in the rock above. The snow which forms the cone descends in winter by this shaft; and the formation must have been going on for a considerable time, since the lower part of the cone has become solid ice, under the combined influences of pressure and of degel and regel. I climbed up the side of this, by cutting steps in the lower part, and digging feet and hands deep into the snow higher up; and I found the length of the side to be 30 feet. I had no means of determining the height of the cave, and a guess might not be of much value.

At first sight, the farther end of the cave was the most striking. The water which comes from the melting snow down which we had passed in reaching the glaciere, had cut itself deep channels in the floor, and through these it coursed rapidly till it precipitated itself into a large pit or moulin in the ice, at the lowest point. This pit, a will be seen by the section of the cave given on p. 174,[71] terminates the glaciere; and the rock-wall at the farther edge falls away into a sort of open fissure, down which magnificent cascades of ice stream emulously, clothing that side of the pit, which would otherwise be solid rock. We cut a few steps about the upper edge of this moulin, to make all safe, and proceeded to let down a lighted candle, which descended safely for 36 feet, showing nothing but ice on all sides; it then came in contact with one of the falls of water, and the light was of course extinguished. We next tied a stone to the string, and found that after 40 feet it struck on ice and turned inwards, under our feet, stopping finally at the end of 51 feet; but whether it was really the bottom of the pit that stopped it, or only some ledge or accidental impediment, we could not determine. The diameter of this pit might be 3 yards, but we took no measure of it.

At the extreme right of the cave we found another pit, a yard and a half across, two-thirds of the circumference of which was formed by the plateau of ice on which we stood, and the remaining third by a fluting in the wall of rock. The maire said that, two years ago, this hole was not visible, being concealed by a large ice-column which had since fallen in. Here again I let down a lighted candle, with more hopes of getting it to the bottom, as no part of the cave drained into the pit. The candle descended steadily, the flame showing no signs of atmospheric disturbance, and revealing the fact that the opposite side of the pit, viz. the rock, which alone was visible from our position, became more and more thickly covered with ice, of exquisite clearness, and varied and most graceful forms. As foot after foot, and yard after yard, ran out, and our heads craned farther and farther over the edge of the pit to follow the descending light, (we lay flat on the ice, for more safety,) the cries of the schoolmaster became mere howls, and the maire lapsed into oaths heavy enough to break in the ice. It is always sufficiently disagreeable to hear men swear; but in situations which have anything impressive, either of danger or of grandeur, it becomes more than ever unbearable. I remember on one occasion over-taking a large party in the descent from the Plateau to the Grands Mulets, in a place where the snow was extremely soft, and any moment might land one of us in a crevasse; and I shall never forget the oaths which caught my ear, from a floundering fellow-countryman enveloped from the waist downwards.

When 60 feet had run out, the candle stopped, and on stretching over I saw that it had reached a slope of ice which inclined very steeply northwards, and passed away under the rock, apparently into a fresh cavern. By raising the candle slightly and then letting it drop, we made it glide down this slope for 8 feet; and then it finally rested on a shelf of ice, showing us the shadowy beginnings of what should be a most glorious ice-cave. The little light which the candle gave was made the most of by the reflecting material which surrounded it; and we were able to see that the archway in the rock was rounded off with grey ice, and rested, as it were, on icy pillars. As far as we could judge, there would have been abundant room to pass down the slope under the archway, if only the preliminary 60 feet could by any means have been accomplished; and I shall dream for long of what there must be down there.

As I was anxious to know whether the side of the pit was vertical ice under our feet, I contrived to get about a third of the way round the edge, so as almost to reach the fluting in the rock which formed the farther side of the pit, and then desired the schoolmaster to raise the candle slowly from the ledge on which it still rested. As he pulled it gradually up, I was startled to find that the ice fell away sharply immediately below the spot where we had been collected, and then formed a solid wall; so that we had been standing on the mere edge of a shelf, with nothing but black emptiness below. How far the solid wall receded at the bottom I was unable to determine, for the light of one candle was of very little use at so great a distance, and in darkness so profound. I persuaded the maire to make an effort to reach a point from which he could see the insecurity of the ice which had seemed to form so solid a floor; and he was so much impressed by what he saw, that he fled with precipitation from the cave, and we eventually found him asleep under a bush on the rocks above. In reaching the farther side of the pit, we crossed unwittingly an ice-bridge formed by a transverse pit or tunnel in the ice, which opened into the pit we were examining. The maire afterwards promised to rail off all that end of the glaciere, and forbid his workmen to venture upon it. Considering that the hole itself was only opened two years before by the fall of a column, and has already undergone such changes, I shall be surprised if the ice-bridge, and all that part on which we lay to fathom the pit, does not fall in before very long; and then, by means of steps and ropes and ladders, it may be possible to reach the entrance to the lower cave, 190 feet below the surface of the earth. May I be there to see![72]

The left side of the glaciere, near the entrance, was occupied by a columnar cascade, behind which I forced a passage by chopping away some lovely ornaments of ice. Here also the solid ground-ice falls away a little under the surface, leaving a cavern 8 or 9 feet deep, on the rock side of which every possible glacial fantasy was to be found. The stalactites here presented the peculiar prismatic structure so often noticed; but on the more exposed side of the column they were tipped with limpid ice, free from all apparent external or internal lines. This reminded me of what we had observed in the Glaciere of La Genolliere, namely, that the surface-lines tended to disappear under thaw; so I cut a piece of prismatic ice and put it in my mouth. In a short time it became perfectly limpid, and on breaking it up I could discover no signs of prism. On some parts of the floor of the glaciere, the ice was apparently unprismatic, generally in connection with running water or other marks of thaw; but, to my surprise, I found that it split into prisms very readily.

The maire could not understand how it was that, after a winter especially severe, as that of 1863-4 had been, there should be even less ice than in the preceding summer, and we could see the marks of last year's cutting, down to the edge of the moulin. He said that they had never before cut down in that direction; but in the summer of 1863 they had been so much struck by the clearness of the ice which formed the floor, that they had cut it freely, and removed a large quantity. This, I believe, was the cause of the absence of any great amount of fresh ice. The slope of the whole ice-floor is considerable, and the workmen increased the slope by cutting away the ice in the neighbourhood of the edge of the moulin: they had also, as we could see quite plainly, excavated the clearer parts of the ice between the entrance to the cave and the moulin, so that a sort of trough ran down from near the foot of the snow to the pit at the lower end of the glaciere. When we were there, the water rushed down this trough, and was lost in the pit; and very probably the same may have been the case in the earlier parts of the year, when, according to the view I have already expressed, the ice would under ordinary circumstances have been formed. If this be so, the caverns below must have received immense additions to their stores of ice or water. We observed, by the way, that the slope of ice to which the candle descended in the deeper pit, and the shelf on which it rested, were quite dry, or at any rate free from all apparent signs of the abundant water we should have seen, had that been the outlet for the streams which poured into the moulin. The maire said that the columns and cascades of ice in the cave had been much more beautiful in the previous summer.

The whole cavern would thus appear to be something of the shape of an egg, with the longer axis vertical, and the entrance about half-way up the side. The lower end of this egg-shaped cavity in the rock is filled with ice, which in some parts shrinks from the rock below the surface, though, as far as outward appearance goes, it fills the cavern to its farthest corners. The depth of this ice at one side is 60 feet, and how much more it may be in the middle it is impossible to say. As we have seen, there is a second ice-cave opening out of the principal one, at a depth of 190 feet below the surface; and with respect to this second cave imagination may run riot. Rosset told me that he had noticed, the year before, a strong source of water springing out of the side of a rock, at some little distance from the glaciere; but he could not reach it then, and could not find it now. This may possibly be the drainage of the glaciere in its summer state.

The thermometer stood at 34 deg. in the middle of the cave; and though the others felt the cold very much, I was myself surprised to find so low a register, for the atmosphere seemed to be comparatively warm, judging from what I had experienced in other glacieres. The only current of air we could detect was exceedingly slight, and came from the deeper of the two pits in the ice. It was so slight, that the flame of the candle burned apparently quite steadily when we were engaged in determining the depth and shape of the pit.

The sun had by this time produced such an effect upon the slope of snow outside the glaciere, that we found the ascent sufficiently difficult, especially as our hands were full of various instruments. The schoolmaster was not content to choose the straight line up, and in attempting to perform a zigzag, he came to a part of the slope where the snow lay about 2 inches thick on solid ice, and the result was an unscholastic descent in inverted order of precedence. He got on better over the rolling stones after the snow was accomplished, but the clumsy style of his climbing dislodged an unpleasant amount and weight of missiles; and though he was amiable enough to cry 'Garde!' with every step he took, it will be found by experiment that it is not much use to the lower man to have 'Garde!' shouted in his ears, when his footing is insecure to begin with, and a large stone comes full at his head, at the precise moment when two others are taking him in the pit of the stomach.

We found the maire, as was said, asleep under a bush near the mouth of the pit; and he pronounced himself completely recovered from the effects of the cold, and ready to guide us to a second glaciere. He told us that the amount of ice he sold averaged 4,000 quintaux metriques a week, for the three months of July, August, and September; but the last winter had been so severe, that the lake had provided ice for the artificial glacieres of Annecy, and no one had as yet applied to him this year. As only a fortnight of his usual season had passed, he may have since had plenty of applications, later in the year. The railways have opened up more convenient sources of ice for Lyons, and for some time he has sent none to that town.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 66: A Yorkshire farmer unconsciously adapts the German Wolkenbruch, declaring on occasion that the rain is so heavy, it is 'ommust as if a clood had brussen someweers.']

[Footnote 67: I tried the hay in this chalet one night, with such results that the next time I slept there, two years after, I preferred a combination of planks.]

[Footnote 68: i.e. New milk, warm.]

[Footnote 69: Otherwise graphically called battu.]

[Footnote 70: I had no means of determining the elevation of the ground. The fact of 12 feet of snow is of no value as a guide to the height. Last winter (1864-5) there was 26 feet of snow on the Jura, at a height of less than 4,000 feet, and the position of some of the larger chalets was only marked by a slight boss on the plane surface.]

[Footnote 71: In the section of the cave, I have brought out the deeper pit from the side into the middle, so as to show both in one section: I have also slightly shaded the pits, instead of leaving them blank like shafts in the rock.]

[Footnote 72: I have made arrangements for completing the exploration of this cave, and the one which is next described, in the course of the present summer.]

* * * * *



CHAPTER XI.

THE GLACIERE OF CHAPPET-SUR-VILLAZ, ON THE MONT PARMELAN, NEAR ANNECY.

We started southwards from the Glaciere of Grand Anu, for such they said was the proper name for the cave last described, and passed over some of the wildest walking I have seen. All the most striking features of a glacier were here reproduced in stone: now narrow deep crevasses which only required a slight spring; now much more formidable rents, which we were obliged to circumvent by a detour; now dark mysterious holes with vertical shell-like partitions at various depths; and now a perfect moulin, with fluted sides and every detail appertaining to those remarkable pits, the hollow plunge of falling water alone excepted. In other parts, the smooth slab-like appearance of the surface reminded me of a curious district on one of the summits of the Jura, where the French frontier takes the line of crest, and the old stones marked with the fleur-de-lys and the Helvetic cross are still to be found. In those border regions the old historic distinctions are still remembered, and the frontier Vaudois call the neighbouring French Bourguignons—or, in their patois, Borgognons. They keep up the tradition of old hatreds; and the strange bleak summit, with its smooth slabs of Jura-chalk lying level with the surface, is so much like a vast cemetery, that the wish in old times has been father to the thought, and they call it still the Cemetery of the Burgundians, Cimetiros ai Borgognons.[73]

After a time, we reached a tumbled chaos of rock, much resembling the ice-fall of a glacier, and, on descending, and rounding a low spur of the mountain so as to take a north-westerly course, we found ourselves in a perfect paradise of flowers. One orchis I shall always regret. There seemed to be only a single head, closely packed with flowerets, and strongly scented; it was a pure white, not the green and straw-coloured white of other scented orchises. There were large patches of the delicate faux-lis (Paradisia liliastrum); and though there might not be anything very rare, and the lovely glacier-flowers were of course wanting, the whole was a rich feast for anyone who cares more for delicacy and colour than for botany.

The maire told us that he had found the glaciere, for which we were now in search, two years before, when he accompanied the government surveyor to show him the forests and mountains which formed his property. As he had on that occasion approached the spot from the other side, we walked a long way to place him exactly where the surveyor and he had crossed the ridge of the mountain, and then started him down from the Col in the direction they had taken. He was certain of two things: first, that they had passed by the Col between the Mont Parmelan and the Montagne de l'Eau; and, secondly, that the glaciere was within five minutes of the highest point of the Col. For three-quarters of an hour we all broke our shins, and the officials the Third Commandment. They invoked more saints than I had ever heard of, and, in default, did not scruple to appeal with shocking volubility to darker aid. It was all of no use,—and well it might be; for when we had given it up in despair, after long patience and a considerable period of the contrary, and had descended for half an hour in the direction of a third glaciere, I chanced to look back, and saw that the Col in the neighbourhood of which we had been searching lay between two points of the Montagne de l'Eau; while the true Col between that mountain and the Mont Parmelan lay considerably to the west. When it appears that a guide has probably made a mistake, the only plan is to assume quietly that it is so, as if it were a matter of no consequence, and then he may sometimes be decoyed into allowing the fact: I therefore pointed out to the maire the true Col, and told him that was the one by which he had passed southwards, when he found the glaciere; to which, with unnecessary strength of language, he at once assented. But all my efforts to take him back were unavailing. Nothing in the world should carry him up the mountain again, now that he had happily got so far down. I worked his best and his worst feelings with equal want of success; even national jealousy failed, and he was content to know that a French maire had not pluck to face three-quarters of an hour of climbing, when an English priest was ready to lead the way. The schoolmaster declined to go alone with me, on the ground that neither of us knew the mountain, and threatening clouds were gathering all around. When, at last, I proposed to go by myself, they became menacingly obstructive, and declared that I should certainly not be allowed to face the intricacy of the mountain in a fog. Besides, as the maire put it, he was sure of the way to the third glaciere; and if I were to go up alone to look for the second, I should lose a certainty for a chance, as there was not time to visit both. So with an ill grace I continued the descent with them, being restored to good humour before long by the beauty of the Lake of Annecy, as seen from our elevated position.

It is so impossible to accept in full the accounts one picks up of natural curiosities, that I give the maire's description of the stray glaciere only for what it is worth. It was not extracted without much laborious cross-examination—sais paw vous le dire being the average answer to my questions. The entrance to the cave is about twice as high as a man, and is in a small shallow basin of rock and grass. The floor is level with the entrance, and the roof rises inside to a good height. In shape it is like a Continental bread-oven; and at the time of the maire's visit, the floor was a confused mass of ice and stones, the former commencing at the very entrance. There was no ice except on the floor, the area of which might be as large as that of the surface of the ice in the Glaciere of Grand Anu. No pit was to be seen, and not a drop of water. Snow could have drifted in easily, but they saw no signs of any remaining. If this account be true, especially with respect to the position of the entrance and the horizontal direction of the floor, I have seen no glaciere like it.

We descended for a time through fir-woods, and then again down steep and barren rocks, till we reached the sharp slope of grass which so frequently connects the base of a mountain with the more civilised forests and the pasturages below. The maire led us for some distance along the top of this grass slope, towards the west, skirting the rocks till they became precipitous and lofty, when he said we must be near our point. Still we went on and on without seeing any signs of it, and our guide seemed in despair; and I, for one, entirely gave up the third cave to the same fate as the second, and became very sulky and remonstrative. The entrance to the glaciere, the maire told us, was a hole in the face of the highest rocks, 3 or 4 yards only above the grass; and as we had now reached a part of the mountain where the rock springs up smooth and high, and we could command the whole face, and yet saw nothing, the schoolmaster came over to my side, and told the maire he was a humbug. However, we were then within a few yards of the desired spot, and half-a-dozen steps showed us a small cheminee, down which a strong and icy current of wind blew. The maire shouted a shout of triumph, and climbed the cheminee; and when we also had done the necessary gymnastics, we found a hole facing almost due north, all within being dark. The current blew so determinedly, that matches were of no use, and I was obliged to seek a sheltered corner before I could light a candle; and, when lighted, the candle was with difficulty kept from being blown out. No ice was visible, nor any signs of such a thing,—nothing but a very irregular narrow cave, with darkness at the farther end. As we advanced, we found that the floor of the cave came to a sudden end, and the darkness developed into a strange narrow fissure, which reached out of sight upwards, and out of sight below; and down this the maire rolled stones, saying that there was the glaciere, if only one could get at it without a tourneau. Considering the persistency with which he had throughout declared that there was no possible need for a rope, I gave him some of my mind here, in that softened style which his official dignity demanded; but he excused himself by saying that the gentleman who owned the glaciere, and extracted the ice for private use only, was now living at his summer chalet, a mile or two off, and he, the maire, had felt confident that the tourneau would have been fitted up for the season.

On letting a candle down from the termination of the floor, we found that the perpendicular drop was not more than 12 feet, and from the shelf thus reached it seemed very possible to descend to the farther depths of the fissure; but I had become so sceptical, that I persisted in asserting that there was no ice below. The maire's manner, also, was strange, and I suspected that the cold current of air had caused the place to be called a glaciere, with any other qualification on the part of the cave. One thing was evident,—no snow could reach the fissure. M. Metrai was determined that I must not attempt the descent, pointing out, what was quite true, that though the fall was not great, there seemed no possibility of getting back up the smooth rock. His arguments increased my suspicions; so, leaving all apparatus behind, I dropped down to join the candle, rather hoping to have the satisfaction of sending them off for a rope, in case I could not achieve the last few feet in returning, and knowing that there was no danger of the fate which once threatened the chamois-hunting Kaiser Max.[74]

The drop turned out to be a mere nothing, and, taking the candle, I scrambled on, down the sloping floor of the fissure, towards the heart of the mountain, expecting every moment that my further passage would be stopped by solid rock. But, after reaching a part so narrow that I was obliged to mount by both sides at once in order to get past it, I found a commodious gallery, opening out into a long and narrow and very lofty cavern, still only a fissure, the floor of which continued the regular and rapid slope down which I had so far come. A short way farther down, an opening appeared to the left; and I turned off the main passage into a horizontal gallery or chamber, with a floor of ice resting on rock and stones. This chamber seemed to be 3 or 4 yards wide at the entrance, narrowing regularly to 4 1/2 feet. It was 40 feet long, and at the farther end, which would not have been visible from the entrance, on account of a slight bend in the ice-gallery, even if there had been any light, it was closed by an ice-cascade 7 yards high and 4 1/2 feet broad at the bottom. The ice of much of this cascade was so clear, that I saw the rock upon which it rested, or in some parts did not rest, quite plainly, and the large air-cavities in the structure were beautifully shown by the richly-coloured rock behind. None of the current which we had observed above, and which had nearly baffled my protecting care of the candle during the descent, came from this gallery; but I find it written in my notes that the gallery was very cold. Thaw was going on, rather rapidly; and the water stole out by the entrance, and ran down the main descent, over ice and among rocks, into the farther darkness.

When I came out again from this gallery, I mounted the slope towards my companions, and tried to tempt them down. The maire felt himself to be too valuable to his country to be lightly risked, and declined to come; but Rosset took a bold heart, and dropped, after requiring from me a solemn promise that I would give him a back for his return up the rock. We visited the gallery I had already explored, and, as we stood admiring the cascade of ice, a skilful drop of water came from somewhere, and extinguished our only candle. My matches were with the maire; and I was equally sure that he would not bring them down to us, and that we could not go up to fetch them without a light. Rosset, however, very fortunately, had a box in his pocket for smoking purposes; and we cut off the wet wick, and cut down the composition to form another, and so contrived to light the candle again. While we were thus engaged, I chanced to look up for a moment, and saw far above our heads a small opening in the roof, through which a few rays of light entered from the outer world. It was so very far above us, that the uncertain rays were lost long before they got down to our level, being absorbed in the universal darkness, and being in fact rather suggested than visible even at their strongest. Those who have been at Lauterbrunnen in a very dry season, will understand how these rays presented the appearance of a ghostly Staubbach of unreal light. We must have been at an immense depth below the surface in which the opening lay; and if there had been a long day before us, it would have been curious to search for the fissure above. Sir Thomas Browne says, in the Religio Medici, 'Conceive light invisible, and that is a spirit.' We very nearly saw a spirit here.

The descent from the mouth of this chamber to the deeper recesses of the main fissure was very rough, but was speedily accomplished, and we reached a point where solid rock stopped us in face; while, to the right, a chamber with a threshold of ice was visible, and, to the left, a dark opening, down which the descent appeared to continue. From this opening all the strong cold current came. We took the ice-chamber first.

The entrance had evidently been closed till very lately by a large column of ice, and we passed over the debris, between rock portals and on a floor of solid grey ice, into a triangular cave of any height the imagination might choose to fix. The entire floor of the cave was of ice, giving the impression of infinite thickness and firmness. A little water stood on it, near the threshold, so limpid that we could not see where it commenced. The base of this triangular floor we found to be 17 feet, and its altitude 30 feet; and though these dimensions may seem comparatively small, the whole effect of the thick mass of ice on which we stood, with the cascades of ice in the corners, and the ice-figures on the walls, and the three sides of the cave passing up into sheer darkness, was exceedingly striking, situated, as it all was, so deep down in the bowels of the earth. The original entrance to the fissure, at the top of the cheminee, was, as has been said, at the base of lofty rocks, and we had descended very considerably from the entrance; so that, even without the strange light thrown upon the matter by the small hole overhead, through which we had seen the day struggling to force its way into the cavern, we should have been sure that we were now at an immense distance below the surface. One corner of the cave was occupied by a broad and solid-looking cascade, while another corner showed the opening of a very narrow fissure, curved like one of the shell-shaped crevasses of a glacier. Into this fissure the ice-floor streamed; and Rosset held my coat-tails while I made a few steps down the stream, when the fall became too rapid for further voluntary progress. I let down a stone for 18 feet, when it stuck fast, and would move neither one way nor the other. The upper wall of this fissure was clothed with moss-like ice, and ice of the prismatic structure,—with here and there large scythe-blades, as it were, attached by the sharp edge to the rock, and lying vertically with the heel outwards. One of these was 11 inches deep, from the heel to the rock, and only one-eighth of an inch thick at the thickest part.

The angle occupied by the cascade or column was the most striking. The base of the column was large, and apparently solid, like a smooth unbroken waterfall suddenly frozen. It fitted into the angle of the cave, and completely filled up the space between the contiguous walls. I commenced to chop with my axe, and before long found that this ice was hollow, though very thick; and when a sufficient hole was made for me to get through, I saw that what had looked like a column was in truth only a curtain of ice hung across the angle of the cave. Within the curtain the ice-floor still went on, streaming down at last into a fissure something like that in the other corner. The curtain was so low, that I was obliged to sit on the ice inside to explore; and after a foot or two of progress, the slope towards the fissure became sufficiently great to require steps to be cut. The stream of ice turned round a bend in the fissure, very near the curtain, and was lost to view; but Rosset stood by the hole through which I had passed—on the safer side of it—and despatched blocks of ice, which glided past me round the corner, and went whizzing on for a long time, eventually landing upon stones, and sometimes, we fancied, in water. It is very awkward work, sitting on a gentle slope of the smoothest possible ice, with a candle in one hand, and an axe in the other, cutting each step in front; especially when there is nothing whatever to hold by, and the slope is sufficient to make it morally certain that in case of a slip all must go together. Of course, a rope would have made all safe. When I groaned over the maire's obstinacy, Rosset asked what could possibly be the use of a rope, if I were to slip; and, to my surprise, I found that he had no idea what I wanted a rope for. When he learned that, had there been one, he would have played a large part in the adventure, and that he might have had me dangling over an ice-fall out of sight round the corner, he added his groans to mine, and would evidently have enjoyed it all very much. At the same time, he was prudent, and, as each block of ice made its final plunge, he told me that was what would happen to me if I went any farther: and, really, the pictures he drew of deep lakes of icy water and jagged points of rock, between which I must make my choice down there, were so unpleasant, that at last I desisted, and pushed myself up backwards, still in a sitting posture, calling Rosset and the maire the worst names I could feel justified in using. On the way, I found one of the large brown flies which we had seen in the Glaciere of La Genolliere, and in the Lower Glaciere of the Pre de S. Livres.

Rosset now told me he was so cold he could stand it no longer; but, after a little pressure, and a declaration on my part that he should not have a candle for going up again, he consented to remain with me while I explored the remaining chamber, the lowest of all. This chamber may be called a continuation of the main passage. It is of about the same width as the highest of the three chambers, and the floor descends rapidly, the cold current of air becoming very strong and biting as we penetrated into the darkness. As the Genevese savans seemed to believe in 'cold currents' as the cause of underground ice, I was naturally anxious to see as much as possible of the state of this gallery, from which every particle of the current seemed to come. We very soon reached a narrow dark lake, and, exclaiming that here was ice again, I stepped, not on to, but into it, and found that it was water. When our solitary candle was brought to bear upon it, we saw that it was so clear as not in any way to impede our view, producing rather the effect of slightly-clouded spectacles upon the stones at the bottom. This lake filled up the whole breadth of the gallery, here perhaps 4 or 5 feet, and rapidly passed to the depth of a yard; but for a little distance there were unstable stones at one edge, and steps in the rock-wall, by which I could pass on still into the darkness, supported by an alpenstock planted in the water. The current of cold air blew along the surface of the water from the farther extremity of the gallery, wherever that might be. As far as our eyes could reach, we saw nothing but the black channel of water, with its precipitous sides passing up beyond our sight. It might have been possible to progress in a spread-eagle fashion, with one hand and one foot on each side; but a fall would have been so bitterly unpleasant, that I made a show of condescension in acceding to Rosset's request that I would not attempt such a thing. In the course of my return to the rocks where he stood, I involuntarily fathomed the depth of the lake, luckily in a shallower part, and was so much struck by the coldness of the water, that I left Rosset with the candle, and struggled up without a light to the place where we had left the maire, or rather to the bottom of the drop from the entrance-cave, to get the thermometer. The maire was sunning himself on the rock, out of reach of the cold current; but he came in, and let down the case, and I quickly rejoined the schoolmaster. At first, it would have been impossible to move about without a light; but our eyes had now become to some extent accustomed to the darkness, and I had learned the difficulties of the way.

When the thermometers were suspended in the water, Rosset asked how long they must stay there. I rashly answered, a quarter of an hour; on which he demanded indignantly whether I supposed he meant to stay in that cold for a quarter of an hour. He had now the candle in his own possession, and I was propped on a stone and an alpenstock in the lake, so he turned to go, vowing that he would leave me alone in the dark if I did not come out at once. There was no help for it, as the thermometer would have been of no use without a candle, and a step in the dark is not pleasant when all around is water, so I slowly drew up the thermometer and read 33 deg. F. In making final arrangements for departure, I let it lie in the water for a few seconds longer, and it fell to 321/2 deg.; but Rosset would not stay a moment longer, and I was obliged to be content with that result. He made himself very easy about the matter, and said we must call it zero; and in the evening I heard him telling the maire that the greatest of the wonders he had missed, by his patriotic care for his neck, was a lake of water which did not freeze, though its temperature was zero (centigrade).

Among the stones at the bottom of this water, I saw here and there patches of a furry sort of ice. I have often watched the freezing of a rapid Scotch stream, where, in the swifter parts, the ice forms first at the bottom and gradually creeps up the larger stones till it appears on the surface, and becomes a nucleus, round which pieces of floating ice collect; and the substance in the glaciere-lake had exactly the same appearance as the Scotch ground-ice. But it could not be the same thing in reality, for, as far as I understand the phenomenon of ground-ice, some disturbed motion of the water is necessary, to drive down below the surface the cold particles of water, which become ice the moment they strike upon any solid substance shaped like fractured stone;[75] the specific gravity of freezing water being so much less than that of water at a somewhat higher temperature, that without some disturbing cause it would not sink to the bottom.[76] So that it seems probable that the ice at the bottom of the lake was the remains of a solid mass, of which the greater part had been converted into water by some warm influence or other. We noticed that a little water trickled down among the stones which formed the slope of descent into the lowest gallery, so that perhaps the lake was a collection of water from all parts of the various ramifications of the fissure. Whence came the icy wind, it is impossible to say, without further exploration. It was satisfactory to me to find that the 'cold current' of the Genevese savans was thus associated with water, and not with ice, in the only cave in which I had detected its presence to any appreciable extent, the currents of the Glaciere of Monthezy being of a totally different description.

When we reached the final rock, in ascending, I offered Rosset the promised back, but he got up well enough without it. Before leaving the entrance-cave, we inspected the thermometer which we had left to test the temperature of the current of air, and, to my surprise, found it standing at 48 deg.. We saw, however, that it had been carelessly propped on a piece of rock which sheltered it from the influence of the current, so I exposed it during the time occupied in arranging the bag of tapes, &c., and it fell to 36 deg.: whether it would have fallen lower, the impatience of Rosset has left me unable to say. If I can ever make an opportunity for visiting the Mont Parmelan again, I shall hope to take a cord, in order to investigate the mysterious corner of the triangular chamber; and I shall certainly make myself independent of shivering Frenchmen while I measure the temperature of the lake and the current of air. We met a man outside who said that he was employed by the owner, M. de Chosal of Annecy, to cut the ice; he had been down three times to the lowest gallery in different years, in the end of July, and had always found the same collection of water there. The glaciere, he told us, was discovered about thirty years ago.

The maire had basked in the sun all the time we were down below, and he expressed himself as much pleased that we had found so much to interest us, in spite of the miscarriage of our efforts to reach the second glaciere. We set off down the steep grass at a scrambling sliding run, against which I was speedily obliged to protest, explaining that a certain ugly inflammation above the left knee was becoming worse every other step, and as the leg must last three days longer, it would be as well to humour it. They saw the force of this reasoning, and we descended with much gravity till we came in sight of the Mairie, still half an hour off, when Rosset cried out that he smelled supper, and rushed off at an infectious pace down the remainder of the mountain-side.

We reached the Mairie at six o'clock, and sat down at once 'to eat something.' The first course was bread and kirsch; and when that was finished, six boiled eggs appeared, and a quart carafe of white wine. These having vanished, their place was taken by a dish of sodden cabbage, and another quart of wine; but, to save the credit of the maire and the schoolmaster, I will not say how often the former functionary descended to the cellar with a quart pitcher, with increasing impetuosity. Next came a dish of onions, with a pretence of mange-tout, broiled brown after boiling, and served in a compound fat; and then haricots with a like condiment, and with a flavour reminiscent of the previous course. There was some talk of a poulet; but the bird still lived, and the talk came to nothing. The dinner ended with the haricots, and we then relapsed into dessert, namely, bread and kirsch. The mayoress came in with the dessert, and sat on the end of the bench, below the hats and the bread-tin, eating the remaining onions off the dish with the spoon of nature.

During one of the maire's frequent visits to the cellar, I propounded a question to the schoolmaster which had puzzled me for some time: Was I to pay the maire? M. Rosset said that it was certainly not necessary, but I had better propose it, and I should then see how M. Metral took it. This I accordingly did, when the adieux in the house had been said, and my host was showing me the way to Thorens, where I was to sleep, he, also, declared that it was not necessary—the pleasure he had experienced in accompanying me had already fully recompensed him: still, if I wished to reimburse him for that which I had actually cost, he was a man reasonable, and in all cases content. I calculated that the dinner and wine which had fallen to my share would be dear at a franc, and the day's wage of a substitute to do the maire's neglected work could not come to much, so I boldly and unblushingly gave that great man four francs, and he said regretfully that it was more than enough. To his son and heir—the identical boy who had brought the ring of bread up the mountain to the chalet where we lunched. I gave something under two-pence, for guiding me across two doubtful fields into a beaten track, and he expressed himself as even more content than the maire. They both told me that it was impossible to miss the way; but I imagine that I achieved that impossibility, as I had to walk through two streams in the deepening twilight, and the prevailing fear of water in that region is very considerable.

The auberge at Thorens to which the maire had recommended me, as being the best, and kept by a personal friend of his, bore the sign a la Parfaite Union. The entry was by the kitchen, and through the steam and odour of onions, illuminated by one doubtful oil-lamp, I saw the guest-room filled with people in Sunday dress, while two fiddles played each its own tune in its own time. Nothing but the potent name of M. the Maire of Aviernoz gained me even a hearing; and, for a bed, I was obliged to stretch my intimacy with that exalted personage to the very furthest bounds of truth. Chappaz Nicolai, whose name the maire had written in my note-book, that there might be no mistake, appeared to be of that peculiar mental calibre which warrants Yorkshire peasants in describing a man as 'half-rocked,' or 'not plumb.' His wife, on the other hand, was one of those neat, gentle, sensible women, of whom one wonders how they ever came to marry such thick-lipped and blear-eyed men. Between them they informed me that if I did not object to share a room, I could be taken in; otherwise—maire or no maire—not. I asked whether they meant half a bed; but they said no, that would not be necessary at present; and I accepted the offered moiety of accommodation, as it was now seventeen hours since I had started in the morning, and I was not inclined to turn out in the dark to look for a whole room elsewhere.

The stairs were a sort of cross between a ladder and nothing, and when we reached the proposed room a large mastiff was in possession, who would not let us enter till the master was summoned to expel him. The furniture consisted of a table and five chairs, with no bed or beds. On the chairs were various articles of clothing, blouses and garments more profound, belonging probably to members of the party below; and on the table, a bottle of water and a soup-plate, the pitcher and basin of the house. It was a mere slip of a room, with two diamond-shaped holes in one wall, whose purpose I discovered when my guide opened a papered door, in which were the holes, and displayed two beds foot to foot in an alcove. One of these, she was sure, would be too short for me, but she feared I must be satisfied with it, as the other was much broader and would therefore hold the two messieurs. How the two? I asked, and was told that two pensionnaires lived in this room; but they were old friends, and for one night would sleep in the same bed to oblige monsieur. The ideas of length and breadth in connection with the beds were entirely driven from my head by the fact of their dirtiness; and I determined that if the two pensionnaires occupied the one, the other should be unoccupied.

After arranging things a little, I struggled down the steps again, and ordered coffee and bread in a little room, which commanded the assembly with the fiddles in the larger salle. The head waitress, busy as she was, found time to come now and then to an open window near where I sat, and talked to a male friend sitting outside in the dark: indeed, she did more than talk, and people had to rattle their glasses very hard before they could make her hear. From her I learned that this was a marriage party which had arrived; and when I asked why they did not dance, as the fiddles were engaged at that moment with unwonted unanimity upon dance-music, she gave me to understand that these were not people of Thorens, but only a party from another village, making the evening promenade after the wedding: from which it would seem that it is not the etiquette for people to dance under such circumstances, except in the home village. They sat round a table, men and women alternately, with their hats on, and with glasses before them. The bride and bridegroom were accommodated with a bench to themselves at the head of the table, he likewise with his hat on, and with a pipe in his mouth, which, seeing that he was a demonstrative bridegroom, one might have supposed to be an inconvenience. He managed very well, however, and every one seemed contented: indeed, the pipe must, I think, be held to be no difficulty; for the men all smoked, and yet, to judge from appearances, there was a prospect of as many marriages as there were couples in the room. The unruffled gravity, however, and the apparent want of zest, both in giving and receiving, which characterised the proceedings specially referred to, led me to suppose that it might be only a part of the etiquette, and so meant nothing serious.

Between ten and eleven the fiddles and the party vanished, and I went up-stairs more determined than ever not to touch a bed, after my experience of the room below. Three chairs were speedily arranged between the table and wall, and on these I lay and tried to sleep. But the very chairs were populous, as I had found below, and sleep was impossible. Moreover, soon after eleven, a soldier came into the room, to arrange about his breakfast with one of the maidens in the house. He had heard me order fresh butter for six o'clock, and he was anxious to know, whether, by breakfasting at five o'clock, he could get my butter. The chairs which formed my bed were under the lee of the table, so that the figure recumbent on them was invisible, and the gallant soldier, under the impression that there was no one in the room, enforced his arguments by other than conventional means. But military lips, when applied personally, proved to be a rhetoric as unsuccessful as military words. The maid was platonic, and something more than platonic; and the hero got so much the worst of it, that he gave up the battle, and changed the subject to a conscript in his charge, who had locked himself in his bed-room and would not answer. How was he to know whether he had the conscript safe? All this lasted some time; and when they were gone, one of the pensionnaires came in. With him I had to fight the battle of the window, which I had opened to its farthest extent. After he had got over the first surprise and shock of finding me on the chairs instead of in the bed, for whose comfort he vouched enthusiastically, he became confident that it was merely out of complaisance to him and his comrade that I had opened the window, and assured me that they really did not care for fresh air, even if they could feel the difference in the alcove, which he declared they could not. As soon as that was arranged to my satisfaction, the other pensionnaire came in, and with him the battle was fought with only half success, for he peremptorily closed one side of the window. He was a particularly noisy pensionnaire, and shied his boots into every corner of the room before they were posed to his satisfaction. As far as I could tell, the removal of the boots was the only washing and undressing either of them did; and then they arranged their candles in the alcove, lighted cigars, and got into bed. There the wretches sat up on end, smoking and talking vehemently, till sheer exhaustion came to my aid, and I fell asleep; but the edges of the rush-bottomed chairs speedily became so sharp that a recumbent posture ceased to be possible, and I sat dozing on one chair. A little before four o'clock, the noisier man got up to look for his boots; and as the friends continued their discussion, I also turned out and made for the nearest stream, where I bathed in a rapid at half-past four, to wash away, if possible, the horrors of the night.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 73: The true Cimetiere des Bourguignons is the enclosure where Rene, the victor of Nancy, buried the Burgundians who fell on the sad Sunday when Charles the Bold went down before the deaf chatelain Claude de Bagemont.]

[Footnote 74: Neither of my companions, I fear, would have acted as Sejanus did, when another emperor was in danger of his life in the cave on the Gulf of Amyclae. (Tacit. Ann. iv. 59.)]

[Footnote 75: Water reduced to a temperature below 32 deg. without freezing, begins to freeze as soon as a crystal is dropped into it, the ice forming first on the faces of the crystal.]

[Footnote 76: Water attains its maximum of specific gravity at 40 deg.. Below 40 deg. it becomes lighter.]

* * * * *



CHAPTER XII.

THE GLACIERES OF THE BREZON, AND THE VALLEY OF REPOSOIR.

The bill a la Parfaite Union was as small as the accommodation at that auberge, and it was an immense relief to get away from the scene of my sufferings. The path to Bonneville lies for the earlier part of the way through pleasant scenery; and when the highest ground is reached, there is a lovely view of the Lake of Geneva, which may be enjoyed under the cool shade of a high hedge of trees, in the intervals of browsing upon wild strawberries. But after passing the curious old town of La Roche, two hours' walk from Thorens, the heat and dust of the dreary high road became insupportable; and no pedestrian who undertakes that march with a heavy knapsack, under a blazing noonday sun, will arrive at Bonneville without infinite thankfulness that he has got through it. The road is of the same character as that between Bonneville and Geneva, and that will sufficiently express its unpleasantness in baking times of drought.

The Glaciere of the Brezon lies at no great distance from Bonneville—perhaps not more than four or five miles to the SE.—but its elevation is more than 4,000 feet, and the approach is steep. The Glaciere of the Valley of Reposoir, a valley which falls into the main road between Bonneville and Chamouni at the village of Scionzier, is considerably higher, and a good deal of climbing is necessary in visiting it. When I arrived at Bonneville, the whole mass of mountains in which these caves lie was enveloped in thick dark clouds, and the faint roar of thunder reached our ears now and then, so that it seemed useless to attempt to penetrate into the high valleys. Moreover, I was due for an attempt upon Mont Blanc in the beginning of the next week, and an incipient bilious fever, with a painful lameness of one leg, warned me that my powers were coming to an end, and that another day such as the last had been would put a total stop upon the proposed ascent; and so I determined to take the fever and the leg to Geneva, and submit them to medical skill. This determination was strengthened by the exhortations of a Belgian, who called himself a grand amateurdes montagnes, on the strength of an ascent of the Mole and the Voiron, and in this character administered Alpine advice of that delightful description which one meets with in the coffee-rooms at Chamouni. This Belgian was the only other guest of the Hotel des Balances; and his amiability was proof even against the inroads of some nameless species of vin mousseux, recommended to me by the waiter, which supplied mal-a-propos wine-sauce to the various dishes from which the Belgian was making his dinner, and did not leave his face and waistcoat free from stain. He had but one remark to make, however wild might be the assertions advanced from the English side of the table, 'Vous avez raison, monsieur, vous avez parfait-e-ment raison!' It is not quite satisfactory to hold the same sentiments, in every small particular, with a man who clips his hair down to a quarter of an inch, and eats haricots with his fingers; but it was impossible to find any subject on which he could be roused to dissentience. This phenomenon was explained afterwards, when he informed me that he was a flannel-merchant travelling with samples, and pointed out what was only too true, namely, that the English monsieur's coat was no longer fit to be called a coat.

Professor Pictet read a paper on these glacieres before the Societe Helvetique des Sciences Naturelles at Berne, in 1822, which is to be found in the Bibl. Universelle de Geneve.[77] M. Pictet left Geneva in the middle of July to visit the caves, but found himself so much knocked up by the first day's work, that he sent on his grandson to the Glaciere of the Brezon, and gave up the attempt himself. The young man found it to be of small dimensions, 30 feet by 25, with a height of 10 or 12 feet. The ice on the floor was believed by the guide to be formed in summer only, and was placed too irregularly to admit of measurement. Calcareous blocks almost choked the entrance, and an orifice in the shape of a funnel admitted the snow freely from above, and was partly filled with snow in July. Cold currents of air proceeded from the rocks in the neighbourhood of the glaciere, giving in one instance a temperature of 38 deg..75, the temperature in the shade being 51 deg.. Within the cave, the temperature was 41 deg..

M. Morin visited this glaciere in August 1828. He describes it as a sheltered hole, in which the snow collects and is preserved.

M. Thury examined it in August 1859, and gives the same account. He, too, found the current of air which the younger Pictet discovered, but in the cave itself the air was perfectly still.

It was clearly, then, no great loss to miss the Glaciere of the Brezon; but that on the Mont Vergy, in the Valley of Reposoir, appears to be much more interesting. Professor Pictet found himself sufficiently strong after a day's rest to pass on to Scionzier, and up the Valley of Reposoir, accompanied by the well-known guide Timothee, whose botanical knowledge of the district is said to be perfect. He had conducted MM. Necker and Colladon to the glaciere in 1807, and believed that no savant had since seen it. The rocks are all calcareous, with large blocks of erratic granite. The glaciere lies about 40 minutes from the Chalet of Montarquis, whence its local name of La grand' Cave de Montarquis. Before reaching it, a spacious grotto presents itself, once the abode of coiners: this grotto is cold, but affords no ice, and near it M. Morin found a narrow fissure, leading into a circular vaulted chamber 15 feet in diameter, in which stood a solitary stalagmite of ice 15 feet high.

The entrance to the glaciere itself is elliptical in shape, 43 feet broad at the base, and the cave increases in size as it extends farther into the rock, the floor descending gently till a horizontal esplanade of ice is reached. This esplanade was 66 feet by 30 at the time of Pictet's visit, deeper in the middle than at the sides, and mounting the rock at the farther side of the cave; there was a small stalagmite at one side, but that would seem to have been the only ornamentation displayed. The temperature was 34 deg..7, a foot above the ice, and 58 deg. in the external air. Timothee had been in the glaciere in the previous April, and had found no ice,—nothing but a pool of water of considerable depth. M. Thury, in August 1859, found two sheets of ice in the lowest part of the cave: one, nearly 50 feet long, was partially covered with water; the other, presenting an area of about 14 square yards, showed more water still. There were no stalactites and columns such as M. Morin had found in August 1828, nor even the low stalagmite which Pictet saw in 1822. The summers of 1828 and 1859 were exceptionally hot, and this fact has been held to account for the smaller quantity of ice seen in those years. M. Thury found the cold due to evaporation to be considerably less than 1 deg. F.,[78] and he and M. Morin both fixed the general temperature of the cave at 36 deg..5; they also found a current of air entering by a fissure in the lowest part of the cave, but it did not disturb the whole of the interior, for in one part the air was in perfect equilibrium. M. Gampert,[79] in the summer of 1823, found a strong and very cold current of air descending by this fissure, along with water which ran from it over the ice; he believed that this was refrigerated by evaporation, in passing through the thickness of the moist rock.

Two peasants visited this cave three times in the winter season, viz. on October 22, November 26, and on Christmas Day; and one of them, by name Chavan, drew up an account of their experiences, which was read by M. Colladon before the Societe de Physique et d'Histoire Nat. de Geneve in 1824.[80] The peasants found very little ice in columns at the time of the October visit, and there were signs of commencing thaw. The thaw was much more pronounced in November, when the ice had nearly disappeared even from the lowest parts of the cave, and they found the air within quite warm. On Christmas Day they had great difficulty in reaching the glaciere, and narrowly escaped destruction by an avalanche, which for a time deterred them from prosecuting the adventure: they persisted, however, and were rewarded by finding only water where in summer all was ice, and a temperate warmth in the cave. They observed that the roof had fissures like chimneys.

This account was so circumstantial, that the only thing left was to attempt an explanation of the phenomena reported, and such explanations have not been wanting. But M. Thury was not quite satisfied, and he determined to visit the cave in the winter of 1860-1. Accordingly, accompanied by M. Andre Gindroz, who had already joined him in his unsuccessful attempt to reach the Glaciere of the Pre de S. Livres, he left Geneva on the 10th of January, and slept at the Chartreuse in the Valley of Reposoir. As the party passed through the village of Pralong du Reposoir, the peasants told them with one accord that they would find nothing but warmth and water in the cave; but when M. Thury asked had any of them seen it themselves, they were equally unanimous in saying no, explaining that it was not worth anyone's while to go in the winter, as there was no ice to be seen then,—a circular line of argument which did not commend itself to the strangers.

At the very entrance of the grotto, they found beautiful stalactites of clear ice; and here they paused, till such time as they should be cool enough to enter, for the thermometer stood at 70 deg. in the sun, and their climb had made them hot. On penetrating to the farther recesses of the cave, where the true glaciere lies, they found an abundance of stalactites, stalagmites, and columns of ice, with flooring and slopes of the same material: not a drop of water anywhere. The stalagmites were very numerous, but none of them more than three feet high; some of the stalactites, fifteen or so in number, were six or seven feet long, and there were many others of a smaller size. M. Thury was particularly struck by the milky appearance of much of the ice, one column in particular resembling porcelain more than any other substance. This is a not unusual character of the most beautiful part of the decorations of the more sheltered ice-caves, as for instance the lowest cave in the Upper Glaciere of the Pre de S. Livres; the white appearance is not due to the presence of air, for the ice is transparent and homogeneous, and the naked eye is unable to detect bubbles or internal fissures.

The temperatures at 1.25 P.M. and 2.12 P.M. respectively were as follows:—In the sun, between 3 and 4 feet above the snow, 72 deg..1 and 70 deg..5; in the shade, outside the cave, 36 deg..7 and 35 deg..8; at the Observatory of Geneva, in the shade, 27 deg..3 and 28 deg..2, having risen from 24 deg..5 since noon. In the cave, 1 foot above the surface of the ice-floor, the thermometer stood at 24 deg..8; and in a hole in the ice, some few inches below the surface, 24 deg..1. In the large fissure, which has been already mentioned as the source of the summer currents of air, the temperature at various points was from 29 deg..3 to 27 deg..5. The circumstances of these currents of air were now of course changed. Instead of a steady current passing from the fissure into the cave, and so out by the main entrance into the open air, strong enough to incline the flame of a candle 45 deg., M. Thury found a gentle current passing from the cave into the fissure, sufficient only to incline the flame 10 deg., and near the entrance 8 deg., while in the entrance itself no current was perceptible at 4 P.M.

M. Thury remarks that less current was to be expected in winter than in summer, because the upper ends of the fissures would be probably choked with snow, and their lower ends with ice. It is evident that the current which passes up into the fissure in winter, is favourable to the introduction of the colder air from without; while the opposite current in summer keeps up a supply of cold air in the cave, and so increases its powers of resisting the attempts of the heated external air to make a partial entrance. Both these currents, then, favour the glacial conditions of the cave, and to some extent counterbalance the disadvantages of its situation: viz., its aspect, towards the south-east; the large size of its opening to the air, and the absence of all shelter near the mouth, such as is so often provided by trees or rocks. The small depth of the cave, scarcely amounting to 18 feet below the level of the entrance, is also a great disadvantage.

The people of Pralong asked, on the return of the party, what had been found in the grand' cave, and the answer reduced them to silence for a few moments. Their prejudices, however, were invincible, and they persisted in their belief that a true glaciere ought to have no ice in it in the winter. M. Thury did not enquire from what source they drew their ideas of a true glaciere.

There is a book, in three volumes, on the 'Glacieres of the Alps,' by M. Bourrit, dedicated to Buffon, in which is a description of the Valley of Reposoir; but no mention whatever is made of the grand' cave. Indeed, M. Bourrit merely meant by glaciere, a glacial district, something more extensive than a glacier, and he had evidently no knowledge of the existence of caves containing ice.