ICE-CAVES

OF

FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND.

A NARRATIVE OF

SUBTERRANEAN EXPLORATION.

BY THE

REV. G.F. BROWNE, M.A.

FELLOW AND ASSISTANT TUTOR OF ST CATHARINE'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE;
MEMBER OF THE ALPINE CLUB.

1865.

PREFACE.

The existence of natural ice-caves at depths varying from 50 to 200 feet below the surface of the earth, unconnected with glaciers or snow mountains, and in latitudes and at altitudes where ice could not under ordinary circumstances be supposed to exist, has attracted some attention on the Continent; but little or nothing seems to be practically known in England on the subject. These caves are so singular, and many of them so well repay inspection, that a description of the twelve which I have visited can scarcely, as it seems to me, be considered an uncalled-for addition to the numerous books of travel which are constantly appearing. In order to prevent my narrative from being a mere dry record of natural phenomena, I have interspersed it with such incidents of travel as may be interesting in themselves or useful to those who are inclined to follow my steps. I have also given, from various sources, accounts of similar caves in different parts of the world.

A pamphlet on Glacières Naturelles by M. Thury, of Geneva, of the existence of which I was not aware when I commenced my explorations, has been of great service to me. M. Thury had only visited three glacières when he published his pamphlet in

1861, but the observations he records are very valuable. He had attempted to visit a fourth, when, unfortunately, the want of a ladder of sufficient length stopped him.

I was allowed to read Papers before the British Association at Bath (1864), in the Chemical Section, on the prismatic formation of the ice in these caves, and in the Geological Section, on their general character and the possible causes of their existence.

It is necessary to say, with regard to the sections given in this book, that, while the proportions of the masses of ice are in accordance with measurements taken on the spot, the interior height of many of the caves, and the curves of the roof and sides, are put in with a free hand, some of them from memory. And of the measurements, too, it is only fair to say that they were taken for the most part under very unfavourable circumstances, in dark caves lighted by one, or sometimes by two candles, with a temperature varying from slightly above to slightly below the freezing-point, and with no surer foot-hold than that afforded by slippery slopes of ice and chaotic blocks of stone. In all cases, errors are due to want of skill, not of honesty; and I hope that they do not generally lie on the side of exaggeration.

CAMBRIDGE: June 1865.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

CHAPTER I.

THE GLACIÈRE OF LA GENOLLIÈRE, IN THE JURA.

In the summer of 1861, I found myself, with some members of my family, in a small rustic pension in the village of Arzier, one of the highest villages of the pleasant slope by which the Jura passes down to the Lake of Geneva. The son of the house was an intelligent man, with a good knowledge of the natural curiosities which abound in that remarkable range of hills, and under his guidance we saw many strange things. More than once, he spoke of the existence of a glacière at no great distance, and talked of taking us to see it; but we were sceptical on the subject, imagining that glacière was his patois for glacier, and knowing that anything of the glacier kind was out of the question. At last, however, on a hot day in August, we set off with him, armed, at his request, with candles; and, after two or three hours of pine forests, and grass glades, and imaginary paths up rocky ranges of hill towards the summits of the Jura, we came to a deep natural pit, down the side of which we scrambled. At the bottom, after penetrating a few yards into a chasm in the rock, we discovered a small low cave, perfectly dark, with a flooring of ice, and a pillar of the same material in the form of a headless woman, one of whose shoulders we eventually carried off, to regale our parched friends at Arzier. We lighted up the cave with candles, and sat crouched on the ice drinking our wine, finding water, which served the double purpose of icing and diluting the wine, in small basins in the floor of ice, formed apparently by drops falling from the roof of the cave.

A few days after, our guide and companion took us to an ice-cavern on a larger scale, which, we were told, supplies Geneva with ice when the ordinary stores of that town fail; and the next year my sisters went to yet another, where, however, they did not reach the ice, as the ladder necessary for the final drop was not forthcoming.

In the course of the last year or two, I have mentioned these glacières now and then in England, and no one has seemed to know anything about them; so I determined, in the spring of 1864, to spend a part of the summer in examining the three we had already seen or heard of, and discovering, if possible, the existence of similar caves.

The first that came under my notice was the Glacière of La Genollière; and, though it is smaller and less interesting than most of those which I afterwards visited, many of its general features are merely reproduced on a larger scale in them. I shall therefore commence with this cave, and proceed with the account of my explorations in their natural order. It is probable that some of the earlier details may seem to be somewhat tedious, but they are necessary for a proper understanding of the subject.

La Genollière is the montagne, or mountain pasturage and wood, belonging to the village of Genollier, an ancient priory of the monks of S. Claude.[^[1]] The cave itself lies at no great distance from Arzier--a village which may be seen in profile from the Grand Quai of Geneva, ambitiously climbing towards the summit of the last slope of the Jura. To reach the cave from Geneva, it would be necessary to take train or steamer to Nyon, whence an early omnibus runs to S. Cergues, if crawling up the serpentine road can be called running; and from S. Cergues a guide must be taken across the Fruitière de Nyon, if anyone can be found who knows the way. From Arzier, however, which is nine miles up from Nyon, it was not necessary to take the S. Cergues route; and we went straight through the woods, past the site of an old convent and its drained fish-pond, and up the various rocky ridges of hill, with no guide beyond the recollection of the previous visits two and three years before, and a sort of idea that we must go north-west. As it was not yet July, the cows had not made their summer move to the higher châlets, and we found the mountains uninhabited and still.

The point to be made for is the upper Châlet of La Genollière, called by some of the people La Baronne, [^[2]] though the district map puts La Baronne at some distance from the site of the glacière. We had some difficulty in finding the châlet, and were obliged to spread out now and then, that each might hunt a specified portion of the wood or glade for signs to guide our further advance, enjoying meanwhile the lilies of the mountain and lilies of the valley, and fixing upon curious trees and plants as landmarks for our return. In crossing the last grass, we found the earliest vanilla orchis (Orchis nigra) of the year, and came upon beds of moonwort (Botrychium Lunaria) of so unusual a size that our progress ceased till such time as the finest specimens were secured.

Some time before reaching this point, we caught a glimpse of a dark speck on the highest summit in sight, which recalled pleasantly a night we had spent there three years before for the purpose of seeing the sun rise.[^[3]] My sisters had revisited the Châlet des Chèvres, which this dark speck represented, in 1862, and found that the small chamber in which we had slept on planks and logs had become a more total ruin than before, in the course of the winter, so that it is now utterly untenable.

From Arzier to the Châlet of La Genollière, would be about two hours, for a man walking and mounting quickly, and never losing the way; and the glacière lies a few minutes farther to the north-west, at an elevation of about 2,800 feet above the lake, or 4,000 feet above the sea. [^[4]]A rough mountain road, leading over an undulating expanse of grass, passes narrowly between two small clumps of trees, each surrounded by a low circular wall, the longer diameter of the enclosure on the south side of the road being 60 feet. In this enclosure is a natural pit, of which the north side is a sheer rock, of the ordinary limestone of the Jura, with a chasm almost from the top; while the south side is less steep, and affords the means of scrambling down to the bottom, where a cave is found at the foot of the chasm, passing under the road. The floor of this small but comparatively lofty cave is 52 feet below the surface of the earth, and slopes away rapidly to the west, where, by the help of candles, the rock which forms the wall is seen to stop short of the floor, leaving an entrance 2 or 3 feet high to an inner cave--the glacière. The roof of this inner cave rises slightly, and its floor falls, so that there is a height of about 6 feet inside, excepting where a large open fissure in the roof passes high up towards the world above. At one end, neither the roof nor the floor slopes much, and in this part of the cave the height is less than 3 feet.

It would be very imprudent to go straight into an ice-cave after a long walk on a hot summer's day, so we prepared to dine under the shade of the trees at the edge of the pit, and I went down into the cave for a few moments to get a piece of ice for our wine. My first impression was that the glacière was entirely destroyed, for the outer cave was a mere chaos of rock and stones; but, on further investigation, it turned out that the ruin had not reached the inner cave. In our previous visit we had noticed a natural basin of some size and depth among the trees on the north side of the road, and we now found that the chaos was the result of a recent falling-in of this basin; so that from the bottom of the first cave, standing as it were under the road, we could see daylight through the newly-formed hole.

The total length of the floor of the inner cave, which lies north-east and south-west, is 51 feet; and of this floor a length of about 37 feet was more or less covered with ice, the greatest breadth of the ice being within an inch or two of 11 feet. Excepting in the part of the cave already mentioned as being less than 3 feet high, we found the floor not nearly so dry, nor so completely covered with ice, as when we first saw the glacière, three years before, in the middle of an exceptionally hot August. Under the low roof all was very dry, though even there the ice had not an average thickness of more than 8 inches. It may be as well to say, once for all, that the ice in these caves is never found in a sheet on a pool of water; it is always solid, forming the floor of the cave, filling up the interstices of the loose stones, and rising above them, in this case with a surface perfectly level.

ICE-COLUMNS IN THE GLACIÈRE OF LA GENOLLIÈRE.

We found four principal columns of ice, three of which, in the loftiest part of the cave, are represented in the accompanying engraving: I call them three, and not two, because the two which unite in a common base proceeded from different fissures. The line of light at the foot of the rock-wall is the only entrance to the glacière. The lowest column was 11-2/3 feet high and 1-2/3 feet broad, not more than 6 inches thick in the middle, half-way up, and flattened symmetrically so as to be comparatively sharp at the edges, like a huge double-edged sword. It stood clear of the rock through its whole height, but scarcely left room between itself and the wall of the cave for a candle to be passed up and down. The other two columns shown in the engraving poured out of fissures in the rock, streaming down as cascades, the one being 13-1/2 and the other 15 feet high; and when we tied a candle to the end of an alpenstock, and passed it into the fissures, we found that the bend of the fissures prevented our seeing the termination of the ice. An intermittent disturbance of the air in these fissures made the flame flicker at intervals, though generally the candle burned steadily in them, and we could detect no current in the cave. The fourth column was in the low part of the cave, and we were obliged to grovel on the ice to get its dimensions: it was 3-1/4 feet broad and 4-1/3 feet high, the roof of the cave being only 2-3/4 feet high; and it poured out of the vertical fissure like a smooth round fall of water, adhering lightly to the rock at its upper end like a fungus, and growing out suddenly in its full size. This column was dry, whereas on the others there were abundant symptoms of moisture, as if small quantities of water were trickling down them from their fissures, though the fissures themselves appeared to be perfectly dry.

In one of the fissures there was a patch of what is known as sweating-stone, [^[5]] with globules of water oozing out, and standing roundly upon it: the globules were not frozen. This stone was exceedingly hard, and defied all our efforts to break off a specimen, but at last we got two small pieces, hard and heavy, and wrapped them in paper; ten weeks after, we found them of course quite dry, and broke them easily, small as they were, with our fingers. The fissure from which the shortest of the four columns came was full of gnats, as were also several crevices in the walls of the cave, especially in the lowest part; and we found a number of large red-brown flies, [^[6]] nearly an inch long, running rapidly on the ice and stones, after the fashion of the flies with which trout love best to be taken. The central parts of the cave, where the roof is high, were in a state provincially known as 'sloppy,' and drops of water fell now and then from above, either splashing on wet stones, or hollowing out basins in the remaining ice, or, sometimes, shrewdly detecting the most sensitive spot in the back of the human neck. We placed one of Casella's thermometers on a piece of wood on one of the wet stones, clear of the ice, and it soon fell to 34°. Probably the temperature had been somewhat raised by the continued presence of three human beings and two lighted candles in the small cavern; and, at any rate, the cold of two degrees above freezing was something very real on a hot summer's day, and told considerably upon my sisters, so that we were compelled to beat a retreat,--not quite in time, for one of our party could not effect a thaw, even by stamping about violently in the full afternoon sun.

While we were in the cave, we noticed that the surfaces of the columns were covered by very irregular lines, marked somewhat deeply in the ice, and dividing the surface into areas of all shapes, a sort of network, with meshes of many different shapes and sizes. These areas were smaller towards the edges of the columns; the lines containing them were not, as a rule, straight lines, and almost baffled our efforts to count them, but, to the best of my belief, there were meshes with three, four, and up to eight sides. The column which stood clear of the rock was composed of very limpid ice, without admixture of air; but the cascades were interpenetrated by veins of looser white ice, and, where the white ice came, the surface lines seemed to disappear. As we sat on the grass outside, arranging our properties for departure, my attention was arrested by the columnar appearance of the fractured edge of the block of ice which we had used at luncheon. It was about 5 inches thick, and had formed part of a stalagmite whose horizontal section, like that of the free column, would be an ellipse of considerable eccentricity; and, on examination, it turned out that the surface areas, which varied in size from a large thumb-nail to something very small, were the ends of prisms reaching through to the other side of the piece of ice, at any rate in the thinner parts, and presenting there similar faces. Not only so, but the prisms could be detached with great ease, by using no instrument more violent than the fingers; while the point of a thin knife entered freely at any of the surface lines, and split the ice neatly down the sides of the prisms. When one or two of the sides of a prism were exposed, at the edge of the piece of ice, the prism could be pushed out entire, like a knot from the edge of a piece of wood. In some cases there seemed to be capillary fissures coincident with the lines where several sides of prisms met. Considering the shape of the whole column, it is clear that the two ends of each prism could not be parallel; neither was one of the ends perfectly symmetrical with the other, and I do not think that the prisms were of the nature of truncated pyramids. On descending again, I found that the columns were without exception formed of this prismatic ice, either in whole, as in the clear column, or in part, as where limpid prisms existed among the white ice which ran in veins down the cascades. In the free vertical column the prisms seemed to be deposited horizontally, and in the thicker parts they did not pass clear through. We carried a large piece of ice down to Arzier in a botanical tin, and on our arrival there we found that all traces of external lines had disappeared.

This visit to the glacière was on Saturday, and on the following Monday I determined to go up alone, to take a registering thermometer, and leave it in the cave for the night; which, of course, would entail a third visit on the next day. Monday brought a steady penetrating rain, of that peculiar character which six Scotch springs had taught me to describe as 'just a bit must;' while in the higher regions the fog was so hopeless, that a sudden lift of the mist revealed the unpleasant fact that considerable progress had been made in a westerly direction, the true line being north-west. Instead of the rocks of La Genollière, the foreground presented was the base of the Dôle, and the chasm which affords a passage from the well-known fortress of Les Rousses into Vaud. There was nothing for it but to turn in the right direction, or attempt to do so, and force a way through the wet woods till something should turn up. This something took the form of a châlet; but no amount of hammering and shouting produced any response, and it was only after a forcible entrance, and a prolonged course of interior shouting, that a man was at length drawn. He said that he had been asleep--and why he put it in a past tense is still a mystery--and could give no idea of the direction of the châlet on La Genollière, beyond a vague suggestion that it was somewhere in the mist; a suggestion by no means improbable, seeing that the mist was ubiquitous. One piece of information he was able to give, and it was consoling: I was now, it seemed, on the Fruitière de Nyon, and therefore the desired châlet could not be far off, if only a guide could be found. On the whole, he thought that a guide could not be found; but there were men in the châlet, and I might go up the ladder with him and see what could be done. He led to a chamber with a window of one small pane, dating apparently from the first invention of glass, and never cleaned since. An invisible corner of the room was appealed to; but the voice which resided there, and seemed like everything else to be asleep, pleaded dreamily a total ignorance of the whereabouts of the châlet in question. Just as, by dint of steady staring through the darkness, an indistinct form of a mattress, with a human being reclining thereon, began to be visible, another dark corner announced that this new speaker had heard of a p'tit sentier leading to the châlet, but knew neither direction nor distance. Here the space between the two corners put in a word; and, as the darkness was now becoming natural, seven or eight mattresses appeared, ranged round the room, some holding one, some two men, most of whom were sitting up on end with old caps on, displaying every variety of squalor. The voice which had spoken last declared that the distance was three-quarters of an hour, and that if the day were clear there would be no difficulty in reaching the châlet; as it was, the man would be very glad to try.

A change of cap was the only dressing necessary for the volunteer, and we faced the fog and rain, which elicited from him such a disgraceful amount of swearing, that it was on all accounts well when the rain ceased for a few minutes, the mists rolled off, and the clouds lifted sufficiently to betray the surface of the Lake of Geneva, luxuriating in the clear warmth of an early summer's day, and making us shiver by the painful contrast which our own altitude presented. The deep blue of the lake brought to mind the story of the shepherd of Gessenay (Saanen), of whom it is told that when he was passing the hills with some friends for a first visit to Vevey, and came in sight of the lake, which he had never seen before, he turned and hurried home incontinent, declaring that he would not enter a country where the good God had made the blue sky to fall and fill the valleys.

In this bright interval we came upon a magnificent fox, and the peasant's impulse was, 'Oh, for a good gun!' an exclamation which would have sounded horrible to English ears, if I had not been previously broken in to it by an invitation from a Scotch gamekeeper to a fox-hunt, when he promised an excellent gun, and a stance which the foxes were sure to pass.

The rain now came on again, and the guide thought he had had plenty of it, and must return for the afternoon milking; and just then, as good luck would have it, we stumbled upon an immense clump of nettles which had been one of our landmarks two days before, so that he was no longer necessary, and we said affectionate adieux.

The glacière was in a state of ruin. Only the right-hand column, not speaking heraldically, was standing, the others lying in blocks frozen hard together on the ground. The column which still stood was much shrunken, and seemed too small for its fissure, the sides of which it scarcely touched. The wind blew down the entrance slope so determinedly, that a candle found it difficult to live at the bottom of the first cave; and a portion of the current blew into the glacière, and in its sweep exactly struck the fallen columns, the edges of which were already rounded by thaw. Much of this must be attributed to the recent opening of the second shaft (p. 5), which admits a thorough draught through the first cave, and so exposes the glacière to currents of warmer air; and I should expect to find that in future the ice will disappear from that part of the cave every summer, [^[7]] whereas in 1861 we found it thick and dry (excepting a few small basins containing water) and evidently permanent, in the middle of a very hot August. The low part of the cave was so completely protected from the current, that the candle burned there quite steadily for an hour and a half: still, like the others, the column at that end of the glacière was broken down, and it therefore became necessary to attribute its fall to some other agency than the current of external air. There had been a very large amount of rain, and the surface of the rock in the fissures was evidently wet; so I have no doubt that the filtering through of the warm rain-water had thawed the upper supports of the ice-cascades, and then, owing to their slightly inclined position, the pedestal had not provided sufficient support, and so they had fallen. One of them, perhaps, had brought down in its fall the free column, which had stood two days before on its own base, without any support from the rock. Very probably, too--indeed, almost certainly,--the fall of the large mass of rock, which once formed the bottom of the basin on the north side of the road, has affected the old-established fissures, by which rain-water has been accustomed to penetrate in small quantities to the glacière, so that now a much larger amount is admitted. On this account, there will probably be a great diminution of the ice in the course of future summers, though the amount formed each winter may be greater than it has hitherto been. Constant examination of other columns and fissures has convinced me, that, before the end of autumn, the majority of the glacières will have lost all the columns which depend upon the roof for a part of their support, or spring from fissures in the wall; whereas those which are true stalagmites, and are self-supporting, will have a much better chance of remaining through the warm season, and lasting till the winter, and so increasing in size from year to year. Free stalagmites, however, which are formed under fissures capable of pouring down a large amount of water on the occasion of a great flood of rain, must succumb in time, though not so soon as the supported columns.

A curious appearance was presented by a small free stalagmite in the retired part of the cave. The surface of the stalagmite was wet, from the drops proceeding from a fissure above, and was lightly covered in many parts with a calcareous deposit, brought down from the fissures in the roof by the water filtering through. The stalagmite was of the double-edged-sword shape, and the limestone deposit collected chiefly at one of its edges, the edge nearer to that part of the cave where thaw prevailed; so that the real edge was a ridge of deposit beyond the edge of the ice.[^[8]] Patches of limestone paste lay on many parts of the ice-floor.

In the loftier part of the cave, water dropped from the roof to so large an extent, that ninety-six drops of water in a minute splashed on to a small stone immediately under the main fissure. This stone was in the centre of a considerable area of the floor which was clear of ice; and it struck me that if the columns were formed by the freezing of water dropping from the roof, there ought to have been at some time a large column under this, the most plentiful source of water in the cave. Accordingly, I found that the edge of the ice round this clear area was much thicker than the rest of the ice of the floor, and was evidently the remains of the swelling pedestal of a column which had been about 12 feet in circumference. This departed column may account for a fact which I discovered in another glacière, and found to be of very common occurrence, viz., that in large stalagmites there is a considerable internal cavity, extending some feet up from the ground, and affording room even for a man to walk about inside the column. When the melted snows of spring send down to the cave, through the fissures of the rock, an abundance of water at a very low temperature, and the cave itself is stored with the winter's cold, these thicker rings of ice catch first the descending water, and so a circular wall, naturally conical, is formed round the area of stones; the remaining water either running off through the interstices, or forming a floor of ice of less thickness, which yields to the next summer's drops. In the course of time, this conical wall rises, narrowing always, till a dome-like roof is at length formed, and thenceforth the column is solid. Of course, the interior cannot be wholly free from ice; and it will be seen from the account of one of these cavities, which I explored in the Schafloch, that they are decked with ice precisely as might be expected. [^[9]] Another possible explanation of this curious and beautiful phenomenon will be given hereafter.[^[10]]

The temperature was half a degree lower than when there were three of us in the cave two days before. I deposited one of Casella's registering thermometers, on wood, on a stone in that part of the floor which was free from ice, though there was ice all round it at some little distance. The thermometer was well above the surface of the ice, and was protected from chance drops of water from the roof.

The next morning I started early from Arzier, having an afternoon journey in prospect to the neighbourhood of another glacière, and was accompanied by Captain Douglas Smith, of the 4th Regiment. On our way to La Genollière, we came across the man who had served as guide the day before, and a short conversation respecting the glacière ensued. He had only seen it once, many years before, and he held stoutly to the usual belief of the peasantry, that the ice is formed in summer, and melts in winter; a belief which everything I had then seen contradicted. His last words as we parted were, 'Plus il fait chaud, plus ça gèle;' and, paradoxical as it may appear, I believe that some truth was concealed in what he said, though not as he meant it. Considering that his ideas were confined to his cattle and their requirements, and that water is often very difficult to find in that part of the Jura, a hot summer would probably mean with him a dry summer, that is, a summer which does not send down much water to thaw the columns in the cave. Extra heat in the air outside, at any season, does not, as experience of these caves proves abundantly, produce very considerable disturbance of their low temperature, and so summer water is a much worse enemy than extra summer heat; and if the caves could be protected from water in the hot season, the columns in them would know how to resist the possible--but very small--increase of temperature due to the excess of heat of one summer above another. And since the eye is most struck by the appearance of the stalagmites and ice-cascades, it may well be that the peasants have seen these standing at the end of an unusually hot and dry summer, and have thence concluded that hot summers are the best time for the formation of ice. Of course, at the beginning of the winter after a hot summer, there will be on these terms a larger nucleus of ice; and so it will become true that the hotter the year, the more ice there will be, both during the summer itself and after the following winter.

The further process of the formation of ice will be this:--the colds of early winter will freeze all the water that may be in the glacières from the summer's thaw, in such caves as do not possess a drainage, and then the frost will have nothing to occupy itself upon but the ice already formed, for no water can descend from the frost-bound surface of the earth.[^[11]] As soon as the snow begins to melt to so great a degree that the fissures are opened up once more, the extremely cold water resulting therefrom will descend through the limestone into a cave perfectly dry, and filled with an atmosphere many degrees below the freezing point, whose frost-power eagerly lays hold of every drop of water which does not make its escape in time by the drainage of the cave. Thus the spring months will be the great time of the formation of ice, and also of the raising of the temperature from some degrees below freezing to the more temperate register at which I have generally found it, viz., rather above than below 32°. Professor Tyndall very properly likens the external atmosphere to a ratchet-wheel, from its property of allowing the passage of hot rays down to the surface of the earth, and resisting their return: it may equally be so described on other grounds, inasmuch as the cold and heavy atmosphere will sink in the winter into the pits which lead to glacières, and will refuse to be altogether displaced in summer by anything short of solar radiation.

We found the one column of the previous day still standing, though evidently in an unhappy state of decay. The sharpness of its edges was wholly gone, and it was withered and contorted; there were two cracks completely through it, dividing it into three pieces 4 or 5 feet long, which were clearly on the point of coming down. Externally, the day was fine and warm, and so we found the cave comparatively dry, only one drop falling in a minute on to the stone where ninety-six had fallen in the same time the day before. The thermometer registered 32° as the greatest cold of the night, and still stood at that point when we took it up.

We spent some little time in exploring the neighbourhood of the pits, in order to find, if possible, the outlet for the drainage, but the ground did not fall away sufficiently for any source from so low an origin to show itself. The search was suggested by what I remembered of the Glacière of S. Georges three years before, where the people believe that a small streamlet which issues from the bottom of a steep rock, some distance off, owes its existence to the glacière.

CHAPTER II.

THE GLACIÈRE OF S. GEORGES, IN THE JURA.

The best way of reaching this glacière from Geneva would be to take the steamer to Rolle, or the train to one of the neighbouring stations, between Geneva and Lausanne, and thence pass up the slope of the Jura by the road which leads through Gimel. For the train, the Allaman station would be the most convenient, as an omnibus runs from Allaman to Aubonne, where the poste for Gimel may be caught. But from Arzier there is a short cut of less than two hours along the side of the hills, leaving that village by a deep gorge not unfitly named L'Enfer, and a dark wood which retains an odour of more savage bygone times in its name of the 'Bear's Wood,' as containing a cavern where an old bear was detected in the act of attempting to winter.[^[12]]

The village of S. Georges has very respectable accommodation for a single traveller, au Cavalier. The common day-room will be found untenable by most Englishmen, however largely they may delight in rough quarters; but there is a double-bedded room at the end of a bricked passage up-stairs, which serves well for bedroom and sitting-room in one. The chief drawback in this arrangement is, that the landlady inexorably removes all washing apparatus during the day, holding that a pitcher and basin are unseemly ornaments for a sitting-room. The deal table, of course, serves both for dressing and for feeding purposes, but it is fortunately so long that an end can be devoted to each; and on the whole it is possible to become considerably attached to the room, with its three airy windows, and the cool unceasing hum of a babbling fountain in the village-street below. The Auberge is a large building, with a clock-tower of considerable height, containing the clock of the commune: as soon as the candle is put out at night, it becomes painfully evident that a rectangular projection in one corner of the room is in connection with this tower, and in fact forms a part of the abode of the pendulum, which plods on with audible vigour, growing more and more audible as the hours pass on, and making a stealthy pervading noise, as if a couple of lazy ghosts were threshing phantom wheat. The clocks of Vaud, too, are in the habit of striking the hour twice, with a short interval; so that if anyone is not sure what the clock meant the first time, he has a second chance of counting the strokes. This is no doubt an admirable plan under ordinary circumstances, but it does certainly try the patience of a sleepless dyspeptic after a surfeit of café-au-lait and honey; and when he has counted carefully the first time, and is bristling with the consciousness that it is only midnight, it is aggravating in the extreme to have the long slow story told a second time within a few feet of his head.

The Cavalier had retained a guide overnight, Henri Renaud by name, and he appeared punctually at eight o'clock in the morning, got up in the short-tail coat of the country, and a large green umbrella with mighty ribs of whalebone. The weather was extremely unpleasant, a cold pitiless rain rendering all attempts at protection unavailing; but, fortunately, the glacière is only an hour and a quarter from the village. The path is tolerably steep, leading across the petit Pré de Rolle, and through woods of beech and fir, till the summit of one of the minor ridges of the Jura is reached, whence a short descent leads to the mouth of the glacière, something more than 4,000 feet above the sea. The ground here slopes down towards the north; and on the slope, among fir-trees, an irregular circular basin is seen, some seven or eight yards across,[^[13]] and perhaps two yards deep, at the bottom of which are two holes. One of these holes is open, and as the guide and I--for my sisters remained at Arzier--stood on the neck of ground between the holes, we could see the snow lying at the bottom of the cave; the other is covered with trunks of trees, laid over the mouth to prevent the rays of the sun from striking down on to the ice. This protection has become necessary in consequence of an incautious felling of wood in the immediate neighbourhood of the mouth, which has exposed the ice to the assaults of the weather. The commune has let the glacière for a term of nine years, receiving six or seven hundred francs in all; and the fermier extracts the ice, and sells it in Geneva and Lausanne. In hot summers, the supplies of the artificial ice-houses fail; and then the hotel-keepers have recourse to the stores laid up for them by nature in the Glacières of S. Georges and S. Livres. Hence the importance of protecting the ice; the necessity for so doing arising in this case from the fact that the entrance to the cave is by a hole in the roof, which exposes the ice to direct radiation, unlike all other glacières, excepting perhaps the Cueva del Hielo on the Peak of Teneriffe.[^[14]]

Autumn appears to be the usual time for cutting the ice, when it is carried from the cave on men's backs as far as the commencement of the rough mountain-road, and is there packed on chars, and so conveyed to the nearest railway station. Renaud had worked in the cave for two years, and asserted that they did not choose the night for carrying the ice down to the station, and did not even care to choose a cool day. He believed that, in the autumn of 1863, they loaded two chars a day for fifteen days, and each char took from 40 to 50 quintaux; the quintal containing 50 kilos, or 100 livres.[^[15]] In Professor Pictet's time (1822) this glacière supplied the Hospital of Geneva, whose income depended in part on its privilege of revente of all ice sold in the town, with 25 quintaux every other day during the summer. In my anxiety to learn the exact amount of ice now supplied by the glacière, I determined to find out the fermier; but Renaud could tell nothing of him beyond the fact that he lived in Geneva, which some promiscuous person supplemented by the information that his name was Boucqueville, and that he had something to do with comestibles. On entering upon a hunt for M. Boucqueville a fortnight later, it turned out that no one had heard of such a person, and the Directory professed equal ignorance; but, under the head of 'Comestibles,' there appeared a Gignoux-Bocquet, No. 34, Marché. Thirty-four, Marché, said, yes--M. Bocquet--it was quite true: nevertheless, it was clear that monsieur meant Sebastian aîné, on the Molard. The Molard knew only a younger Sebastian, but suggested that the right man was probably M. Gignoux-Chavaz, over the way; and when it was objected that Gignoux-Bocquet, and not Gignoux-Chavaz, was the name, the Molard replied that it made no matter,--Chavaz or Bocquet, it was all the same. When M. Gignoux-Chavaz was found, he said that he certainly was a man who had something to do with a glacière, but, instead of farming the Glacière of S. Georges, he had only bought a considerable quantity of ice two years ago from the Glacière of S. Livres, and he did not believe that the fermier of S. Georges lived in Geneva. Part of the confusion was due to the custom of placing a wife's maiden name after her husband's name: thus Gignoux-Chavaz implies that a male Gignoux has married a female Chavaz; and when a Swiss marries an English lady with a very English name, the result in the Continental mouth is sufficiently curious.

On arriving at the entrance to the glacière, the end of a suggestive ladder is seen under the protecting trunks; and after one or two steps have been taken down the ladder, the effect of the cave below is extremely remarkable, the main features being a long wall covered thickly with white ice in sheets, a solid floor of darker-coloured ice, and a high pyramid of snow reaching up towards the uncovered hole already spoken of. The atmosphere of the cave is damp, and this causes the ladders to fall speedily to decay, so that they are by no means to be trusted: indeed, an early round gave way under one of my sisters, when they visited the cave with me in 1861, and suggested a clear fall of 60 feet on to a cascade of ice.[^[16]] There are three ladders, one below the other, and a hasty measurement gave their lengths as 20, 16, and 28 feet. The rock-roof is only a few feet thick in the neighbourhood of the hole of entrance.

ENTRANCE TO THE GLACIÈRE OF S. GEORGES.

The total length of the cave is 110 feet, lying NE. and SW., in the line of the main chain of the Jura. The lowest part of the floor is a sea of ice of unknown depth, 45 feet long by 15 broad; and Renaud tried my powers of belief by asserting that in 1834 the level of this floor was higher by half the height of the cave than now; a statement, however, which is fully borne out by Professor Pictet's measurements in 1822, when the depth of the glacière was less than 30 feet. Indeed, the floor had sunk considerably since my previous visit, when it was all at the same level down to the further end of the cave; whereas now, as will be seen in the section, there was a platform of stones resting on ice at that end. There are two large fissures passing into the rock, one only of which can be represented in the section, and these were full of white ice, not owing its whiteness apparently to the admixture of air in bubbles, but firm and compact, and very hard, almost like porcelain. Small stalactites hung from round fissures in the roof, formed of the same sort of ice, and broken off short, much as the end of a leaden pipe is sometimes seen to project from a wall. With this exception, there was no ice hanging from the roof, though there were abundant signs of very fine columns which had already yielded to the advancing warmth: one of these still remained, in the form of broken blocks of ice, in the neighbourhood of the open hole in the roof, immediately below which hole the stones of the floor were completely bare, and the thermometer stood at 50°. At the far end of the cave, the thermometer gave something less than 32°; a difference so remarkable, at the same horizontal level, that I am inclined to doubt the accuracy of the figures, though they were registered on the spot with due care. The uncovered hole, it must be remembered, is so large, and so completely open, that the rain falls freely on to the stones on the floor below.

By far the most striking part of this glacière is the north-west wall, which is covered with a sheet of ice 70 feet long, and 22 feet high at the highest part: in the neighbourhood of the ladders, this turns the corner of the cave, and passes up for about 9 feet under the second ladder. The general thickness of the sheet is from a foot to a foot and a half; and this is the chief source from which the fermier draws the ice, as it is much more easily quarried than the solid floor. Some of my friends went to the cave a few weeks after my visit, and found that the whole sheet had been pared off and carried away.

VERTICAL SECTIONS OF THE GLACIÈRE OF S. GEORGES.

On some parts of the wall the sheet was not completely continuous, being formed of broad and distinct cascades, connected by cross channels of ice, and uniting at their upper and lower ends, thus presenting many curious and ornamental groupings. On cutting through this ice, it was found not to lie closely on the rock, a small intermediate space being generally left, almost filled with minute limestone particles in a very wet state; and the whole cavern showed signs of more or less thaw.

It was natural to examine the structure of the ice in this glacière, after what we had observed on La Genollière. The same prismatic structure was universal in the sheet on the wall, and in the blocks which lay here and there on the floor and formed the sole remains of former columns. It was to be observed also in many parts of the ice-floor itself. The base of one large column still remained standing in its original position, and its upper end presented a tolerably accurate horizontal section of the column. The centre was composed of turbid ice, round which limpid prisms were horizontally arranged, diverging like the feathers of a fan; then came a ring of turbid ice, and then a second concentric ring of limpid prisms, diverging in the same manner as those which formed the inner ring. There were in all three or four of these concentric rings, the details showing a considerable amount of confusion and interference: the general law, however, was most evident, and has held in all the similar columns which I have since examined in other glacières. The rings were not accurately circular, but presented rather the appearance of having been formed round a roughly-fluted pillar on an elliptical base.

The examination of the ice on the wall gave some curious results. The horizontal arrangement of the prisms, which we had found to prevail in vertical columns, was here modified to suit the altered conditions of the case, and the axes of the prisms changed their inclination so as to be always perpendicular to the surface on which the ice lay, as far as could be determined by the eye. Thus, in following the many changes of inclination of the wall, the axes of the prisms stood at many different angles with the vertical, from a horizontal position where the wall chanced to be vertical, to a vertical position on the horizontal ledges of the rock. The extreme edges, too, of the ice, presented a very peculiar appearance. The general thickness, as has been said, varied from a foot to a foot and a half; and this diminished gradually along horizontal lines, till, at the edges of the sheet, where the ice ceased, it became of course nothing. The extreme edge was formed of globular or hemispherical beads of ice, like the freezing of a sweating-stone, lying so loosely on the rock that I could sweep them off in detail with one hand, and catch them with the other as they fell. Passing farther on towards the thicker parts of the ice, these beads stood up higher and higher, losing their roundness, and becoming compressed into prisms of all shapes, in very irregular imitation of the cellular tissue in plants, the axes of the prisms following the generally-observed law. There seems to be nothing in this phenomenon which cannot be accounted for by the supposition of gradual thaw of small amount being applied to a sheet of prismatic ice.

One fact was remarkable from its universal appearance. Wherever an incision was made in this sheet of ice, the prisms snapped off at the depth of an inch, and could be mowed down like corn by means of a stout knife. Although they broke naturally at this constant depth, and left a surface of limpid ice without any signs of external or internal division, still the laminae obtained by chiselling this lower surface carefully, broke up regularly into the shapes to be expected in sections of prisms cut at right angles to the axis. The roughness of my instruments made it impossible to discover how far this extended, and whether it ceased to be the case at any given depth in the ice.

The sea of ice on the floor was in a very wet state at the surface, being at a lower level than the stones on to which the rain from the open hole fell; and here the prismatic structure was not apparent to the eye, nor do I know whether it existed at all. In the Glacière of La Genollière I carried a large block of perfectly prismatic ice into the outer cave, where it was exposed to the free currents of air passing from the pit of entrance to the hole newly opened by the falling in of the ground; and, two days after, the external lines were scarcely perceptible, while on the occasion of our third visit I found that they had entirely disappeared, and the whole block was rapidly following their example. This disappearance of the surface-lines under the action of atmospheric thaw is probably the same thing as their absence when the flooring of ice is thinly covered with water. Wherever the flooring rose slightly towards the edges of the sea of ice, the usual structure appeared again.

There were no currents of air in the cave, the candles burning steadily through the whole time of our visit. Excepting for the purpose of detecting disturbance in the air, there is no need of candles, as the two holes in the roof supply sufficient light. Some account of the careful observations made here by M. Thury, at different seasons of the year, will be found in other parts of this book. We passed, on our return, by the source of water which springs from the foot of a rock at some distance from the glacière, and is supposed to form the outlet for the drainage of the cave; but it is difficult to understand how this can be the case, considering the form and character of the intervening ground.

The two ice-caves so far described are the least interesting of all that I have visited; but a peasant informed me, a day or two after, that if we had penetrated to the back of the pyramid of snow which lay half under the open hole, being the remains of the large collection which is formed there in the winter, we might have found a deep pit which is sometimes exposed by the melting of the snow. He had some idea that its depth was 30 feet a few years ago, and that its sides were solid ice. I shall have occasion to mention such pits in another glacière; if one does exist here, it has probably been quarried in the ice by the drops from the hole in the roof, and there might be some interest attached to an attempt to investigate it.[^[17]]

We reached S. Georges again in a wretched state of wet and cold, and Renaud went off to bed, and imbibed abundant and super-abundant kirsch,--at least, when drawn thence the next morning, his manner left no doubt about either the fact or the abundance of the potations overnight. Warned by many experiences, I had gone no nearer to a specification of the bill of fare than a vague suggestion that quelque chose must be forthcoming, with an additional stipulation that this must be something more than mere onions and fat. The landlady's rendering of quelque chose was very agreeable, but, for the benefit of future diners au Cavalier, it is as well to say that those who do not like anisette had better make a private arrangement with their hostess, otherwise they will swallow with their soup an amount sufficient for many generations of the drag: they may also safely order savoury rice, with browned veal and wine-sauce, which is evidently a strong point with the Cavalier. All meals there are picturesque; for the omelette lay on the Castle of Grandson and a part of the Lake of Neufchâtel, while the butter reposed on the ruined Cathedral of Sion, and the honey distilled pleasantly from the comb on to the walls of Wufflens. No one should put any trust in the spoons, which are constructed apparently of pewter shavings in a chronic state of semi-fusion. On the evening of the second day, the landlady allowed a second knife at tea, as the knife-of-all-work had begun to knock up under the heavy strain upon its powers; but this supplementary instrument was of the ornamental kind, and, like other ornamental things, broke down at a crisis, which took the form of a piece of crust.

Lest this account should raise anyone's expectations too high, it is as well to add that they have no snuffers in S. Georges, beyond such as Nature provided when she gave men fingers; and they burn attenuated tallow candles with full-bodied wicks. Also, the tea is flavoured with vanille, unless that precious flavouring is omitted by private contract.

CHAPTER III.

THE LOWER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S. LIVRES.

I had intended to walk on from S. Georges to Bière, after returning from the glacière last described, and thence, the next morning, to the Pré de S. Livres, the mountain pasturage of the commune of S. Livres,[^[18]] a village near Aubonne. But Renaud advised a change of plan, and the result showed that his advice was good. He said that the fermier of the Glacière of S. Livres generally lived in S. Georges, and, if he were at home, would be the best guide to the glacière; while the distance from S. Georges was, if anything, rather less than the distance from Bière; so that by remaining at the Cavalier for another night the walk to Bière would be saved, and the possibility of finding no competent guide there would be evaded. Jules Mignot, the farmer in question, was at home, and promised to go to the glacière in the morning, pledging his word and all that he was worth for the existence and soundness of the ladders; a matter of considerable importance, for M. Thury had been unable to reach the ice, as also my sisters, by reason of a failure in this respect.

In the course of the evening Mignot came in, and confidentially took the other chair. He wished to state that he had three associés in working the glacière, and that one of them knew of a similar cave, half an hour from the one more generally known; the associé had found it two years before, and had not seen it since, and he believed that no one else knew where it was to be found. If I cared to visit it, the associé would accompany us, but there was some particular reason--here he relapsed into patois--why this other man could not by himself serve as guide to both glacières. As this meant that I must have two guides, and suggested that perhaps the right rendering of associé was 'accomplice,' the negotiation nearly came to a violent end; but the farmer was so extremely explanatory and convincing, that I gave him another chance, asking him how much the two meant to have, and telling him that, although I could not see the necessity for two guides, I only wished to do what was right. He expressed his conviction of the truth of this statement with such fervour, that I could only hope his moderation might be as great as his faith. He took the usual five minutes to make up his mind what to say, going through abstruse calculations with a brow demonstratively bent, and, to all appearance, reckoning up exactly what was the least it could be done for, consistently with his duty to himself and his family. Then he asked, with an air of resignation, as if he were throwing himself and his associé away, 'Fifteen francs, then, would monsieur consider too much?' 'Certainly, far too much; twelve francs would be enormous. But, for the pleasure of his company and that of his friend, I should be happy to give that sum for the two, and they must feed themselves.' He jumped at the offer, with an alacrity which showed that I had much under-estimated his margin in putting it at three francs; and with many expressions of anticipatory gratitude, and promises of axes and ropes in case of emergency, he bowed himself out. The event proved that both the men were really valuable, and they got something over the six francs a-piece.

The rain had been steadily increasing in intensity for the last twenty-four hours, from the insidious steeping of a Scotch mist to the violence of a chronic thunderstorm, and had about reached this crisis when we started in the morning for the Pré de S. Livres. I had already tested its effects before breakfast, in a search for the Renaud of the day before, who had made statements regarding the ice at S. Georges, and the time of cutting it, which a night's reflection showed to be false. To search for Henri Renaud in the village of S. Georges, was something like making an enquiry of a certain porter for the rooms of Mr. John Jones. The landlady of the Cavalier was responsible for the first stage of the journey, asserting that he lived two doors beyond the next auberge, evidently with a feeling that it was wrong so far to patronise the rival house as to live near it. That, however, was not the same Henri Renaud; and a house a few yards off was recommended as a likely place, where, instead of Henri, a Louis Renaud turned up, shivering under the eaves in company with the fermier, who introduced Louis in due form as the accomplice. They received conjointly and submissively a lecture on the absurdity of calling it a rainy morning, and the impossibility of staying at home, even if it came on much worse, and then pointed the way to the true Henri Renaud, half-way down the village. When I arrived at the place indicated, and consulted a promiscuous Swiss as to the abode of the object of my search, he exclaimed, 'Henri Renaud? I am he.' 'But,' it was objected, 'it is the marchand de bois who is wanted.' 'Precisely, Henri Renaud, marchand de bois; it is I.' 'But, it is the cutter of ice in the glacière.' 'Ah, a different Henri. That Henri is in bed in the house yonder,' and so at last he was found. When finally unearthed, Henri confessed that when he had said spring the day before, he ought to have said autumn, and that by autumn he meant November and December. Enquiries elsewhere showed that the end of summer was what he really meant, if he meant to tell the truth.

Our route for the glacière followed the high road which leads by the Asile de Marchairuz to La Vallée, as far as the well-known Châlet de la S. Georges; and then the character of the way changed rapidly for the worse, and we took to the wet woods. After a time, the wood ceased for a while, and a large expanse of smooth rock showed itself, rising slightly from the horizontal, and so slippery in its present wet condition that we could not pass up it. Then woods again, and then the montagnes of Sous la Roche, and La Foireuse, till at last, in two hours, the Pré de S. Livres was achieved. The fog was so dense that nothing could be seen of the general lie of the country; but the thalweg was a sufficient guide, and after due perseverance we came upon the glacière, not many yards from that line, on the north slope of the open valley, about 4,500 feet above the sea.

To prevent cattle from falling into the pit, a wall has been built round the trees in which it lies. The circumference of this wall is 435 feet, but there are so many trees at the upper end of the enclosure that this gives an exaggerated idea of the size of the pit. The men fed while the preliminary measurements were being made; and when this was accomplished, they pressed their bottle of wine upon me so hospitably that I was obliged to antedate the result which its appearance promised, and plead mal d'estomac. Of all things, it is most unwise to give a reason for a negative, and so it proved in this instance; for they promptly felicitated themselves and me on the good luck by which it happened that they had brought a wine famous on all the côte as a remedy for that somewhat vague complaint--a homoeopathic remedy in allopathic doses.

The glacière is entered by a natural pit in the gentle slope of grass, not much unlike the pit of La Genollière, but wider, and covered at the bottom with snow.[^[19]] The first ladder leads down to a ledge of rock on which bushes and trees grow, and this ledge it is possible to reach without a ladder; the next ladder leads on to the deep snow, and descent by any ordinary manner of climbing is in this case quite impossible.[^[20]] The snow slopes down towards a lofty arch in the rock which forms the north-west side of the pit, and this arch is the entrance to the glacière; it is 28-3/4 feet wide, and as soon as we passed under it we found that the snow became ice, and it was necessary to cut steps; for the surface of underground ice is so slippery, unlike the surface of ordinary glaciers, that the slightest defect from the horizontal makes the use of the axe advisable. The stream of ice falls gradually, spreading out laterally like a fan, so as to accommodate itself to the shape of the cave, which it fills up to the side walls; it increases in breadth from 28-3/4 feet at the top to 72 feet at the bottom of the slope, and the distance from the top of the first ladder to this point is 177 feet. Here we were arrested by a strange wall of ice 22 feet high, down which there seemed at first no means of passing; but finding an old ladder frozen into a part of the wall, we chopped out holes between the upper steps, and so descended, landing on a flooring composed of broken blocks and columns of ice, with a certain amount of what seemed to be drifted snow. This wall of ice, which was 72 feet long and 22 feet high, was not vertical, but sloped the wrong way, caving in under the stream of ice; and from the projecting top of the wall a long fringe of vast icicles hung down, along the whole breadth of the fan. The effect of this was, that we could walk between the ice-wall and the icicles as in a cloister, with solid ice on the one hand and Gothic arcades of ice on the other, the floor being likewise of ice, and the roof formed by the junction of the wall with the top of the icicle-arcade. The floor of this cloister was not 22 feet below the top of the wall, for it formed the upper part of a gentle descending slope of ice, rounded off like a fall of water, which seemed to flow from the lower part of the wall; and the height of 22 feet is reckoned from the foot of this slope, which terminated at a few feet of horizontal distance from the foot of the wall. The wall of ice was plainly marked with horizontal bands, corresponding, no doubt, to a number of years of successive deposits; sometimes a few leaves, but more generally a strip of minuter débris, signified the divisions between the annual layers. There had been many columns of ice from fissures in the rock, but all had fallen except one large ice-cascade, which flowed from a hole in the side of the cave on to the main stream, about two-thirds of the distance down from the snow. One particularly grand column had stood on the very edge of the ice-wall, and its remains now lay below.

The flooring of mingled ice and snow, on which we stood, sloped through about five vertical feet from the foot of the wall, and came to an end on broken rocks, from which the terminal wall of the cave sprang up. The effect of the view from this point, as we looked up the long slope of ice to where the ladders and a small piece of sky were visible, was most striking. The accompanying engraving is from a sketch which attempts to represent it; the reality is much less prim, and much more full of beautiful detail, but still the engraving gives a fair idea of the general appearance of the cave.

While I was occupied in making sketches and measurements, Mignot was engaged in chopping discontentedly at the floor, in two or three different places. At length he seemed to find a place to his mind, and chopped perseveringly till his axe went through, and then he suggested that we should follow. The hole was not tempting. It opened into the blackest possible darkness, and Mignot thrust his legs through, feeling for a foothold, which, by lowering himself almost to his armpits, he soon discovered: the foothold, however, proved to be a loose stone, which gave way under him and bounded down, apparently over an incline of like stones, to a distance which sounded very alarming. But he would not give in, and at length, descending still further by means of the snow in which the hole was made, he was rewarded by finding a solid block which bore his weight, and he speedily disappeared altogether, summoning me to follow. I proposed to light a candle first, not caring to go through such a hole, in such a floor, into no one knew what; but he was so very peremptory, evidently thinking that if he had gone through without a pioneering candle his monsieur might do the same, that there was nothing for it but to obey. The hole was very near the junction of the floor with the slope of stones where the floor terminated, and the space between the hole and the slope seemed to be filled up with a confused mass of snow and ice, in which the snow largely predominated; so that there was good hold for hands and feet in passing down to the stones, which might be about 7 feet below the upper surface of the floor.

LOWER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S. LIVRES.

Here we crouched in the darkness, with our faces turned away from the presumed slope of stones, till a light was struck. The accomplice did not find it in the bond that he should go down, and he preferred to reserve his energies for his own peculiar glacière.

As soon as the candle had mastered a portion of the darkness, we found that we were squatting on a steeply sloping descent of large blocks of stone, while in face of us was a magnificent wall of ice, evidently the continuation of the wall above, marked most plainly with horizontal lines. This wall passed down vertically to join the slope on which we were, at a depth below our feet which the light of the candle had not yet fathomed. The horizontal bands were so clear, that, if we had possessed climbing apparatus, we could have counted the number of layers with accuracy. Of course we scrambled down the stones, and found after a time that the angle formed by the ice-wall and the slope of stones was choked up at the bottom by large pieces of rock, one piled on another just as they had fallen from the higher parts. These blocks were so large, that we were able to get down among the interstices, in a spiral manner, for some little distance; and when we were finally stopped, still the ice-wall passed on below our feet, and there was no possible chance of determining to what depth it went. The atmosphere at this point was a sort of frozen vapour, most unpleasant in all respects, and the candles burned very dimly. The thermometer stood at 32°, half-way down the slope of stones.

We were able to stretch a string in a straight line from the lowest point we reached, through the interstices of the blocks of stone, and up to the entrance-hole, and this measurement gave 50 feet. Considering the inclination of the upper ice-floor, and the sharpness of the angle between the wall of ice and the line of our descent to this lowest point, I believe that 50 feet will fairly represent the height of the ice-wall from this point to the foot of the slope from the upper wall; so that 72 feet will be the whole depth of ice, from the top of the third ladder to the point where our further progress downwards was arrested. The correctness of this calculation depends upon the honesty of Mignot, who had charge of the farther end of the string, and was proud of the wonders of his cave.

SECTION OF THE LOWER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S. LIVRES.

A dishonest man might easily, under the circumstances, have pulled up a few feet more of string than was necessary, but 50 feet seemed in no way an improbable result of the measurement.

The ice was as solid and firm as can well be conceived. The horizontal bands would seem to prove conclusively that it was no coating of greater or less thickness on the face of a vertical wall of rock, an idea which might suggest itself to anyone who had not seen it, and I think it probable that the amount of ice represented in the section of the cave is not an exaggeration. We were unable to measure the whole length of the wall in the lower cave, from the large number of blocks of stone which had fallen at one end, and lay against its face. Probably, from the nature of the case, it was not so long as the 72 feet of wall above; but we measured 50 feet, and could see it still passing on to the right hand as we faced it. In trying to penetrate farther along the face, I found a wing of the brown fly we had seen in considerable abundance on the ice in La Genollière, frozen into the remains of a column.

There was so very much to be observed on all sides, and the measurements took up so much time, owing to the peculiar difficulties which attended them, that I did not examine with sufficient care the curious floor of ice through which we cut our way to the lower cavern. Neither did I notice the roof of the cavern thus reached, which may be very different from the shape of the upper surface of the floor composing it. If the ice-wall goes straight up, and the roof is formed of the ice-floor alone, then it is a very remarkable feature indeed. But, more probably, the lower wall leans over more and more towards the top, and so forms as it were a part of the roof. It is possible that, as the wall has grown, each successive annual layer has projected farther and farther, till at last some year very favourable to the increase of ice has carried the projection for that year nearly to the opposite stones, and then an unfavourable year or two would form the foot of the upper wall. This seems more probable, from the loose constitution of the floor at the point where it joins the stones, as if it were there only made up of drift and débris, while the part of the floor nearer the foot of the wall is solid ice. It has been suggested to me that possibly water accumulates in the time of greatest thaw to a very large extent in the lower parts of the cave, and the ice-floor is formed where the frost first takes hold of this water. But the slope of the ice-floor is against this theory, to a certain extent; and the amount of water necessary to fill the cavity would be so enormous, that it is contrary to all experience to imagine such a collection, especially as the cave showed no signs of present thaw. The appearance of the rocks, too, in the lower cave, and the surface of the ice-wall there, gave no indications of the action of water; and there was no trace of ice among the stones, as there certainly would have been if water had filled the cave, and gradually retired before the attacks of frost, or in consequence of the opening up of drainage. There were pieces of the trunks of trees, also, and large bones, lying about at different levels on the rocks. I never searched for bones in these caves, owing to the absence of the stalagmitic covering which preserves cavern-bones from decay; nor did I take any notice of such as presented themselves without search, for the bergers are in the habit of throwing the carcases of deceased cows into any deep hole in the neighbourhood of the place where the carcases may be found, in consequence of the general belief that living cows go mad if they find the grave of a companion; so that I should probably have made a laborious collection of the bones of the bos domesticus.

This belief of the bergers respecting the cows is supported by several circumstantial and apparently trustworthy accounts of fearful fights among herds of cattle over the grave of some of the herd. The sight of a companion's blood is said to have a similar effect upon them. Thus a small pasturage between Anzeindaz and the Col de Cheville, on the border of the cantons Vaud and Valais, is still called Boulaire from legendary times, when the herdsmen of Vaud (then Berne) won back from certain Valaisan thieves the cattle the latter were carrying off from La Varraz. Some of the cows were wounded in the battle, and the sight of their blood drove the others mad, so that they fought till almost all the herd was destroyed; whence the name Boulaire, from ébouëler, to disembowel,--a word formed from bouë, the patois for boyau.

When we left the lower darkness and ascended to the floor of ice once more, Mignot expressed a desire to see my attempt at a sketch of the glacière from that point, as he had been much struck during his negotiatory visit of the night before by the sketch of the entrance to the Glacière of S. Georges, chiefly because he had guessed what it was meant for. He was evidently disappointed with the representation of his own cave, for he could see nothing but a network of lines, with unintelligible words written here and there, and after some hesitation he confessed that it was not the least like it. A little explanation soon set that right, and then he began to plead vigorously for the wall which surrounded the trees at the mouth of the pit. Why was it not put in? He was told, because it could not be seen from below; but nevertheless he strongly urged its introduction, on the ground that he had built it himself, and it was such a well-built wall; facts which far more than balanced any little impossibility that might otherwise have prevented its appearance. After we had reached the grass of the outer world again, he made me sketch the entrance to the pit, pointing to the containing wall with parental pride, and standing over the sketch-book and the sketcher with an umbrella which speedily turned inside out under the combined pressure of wind, and rain, and years; a feat which it had already performed des fois, he said, in the course of his acquaintance with it.

Before finally leaving the glacière, I examined the structure of the great stream of ice, at different points near the top of the limiting wall. From its outward appearance it might have been expected to be rough, but it was not so; it was knotty to the eye, but perfectly smooth to the foot, and, when cut, showed itself perfectly clear and limpid. It did not separate under the axe into misshapen pieces, with faces of every possible variation from regularity, that is, with what is called vitreous fracture, but rather separated into a number of nuts of limpid ice, each being of a prismatic form, and of much regularity in shape and size. It was smooth, dark-grey, and clear; free from air, and free from surface lines; very hard, and suggesting the idea of coarse internal granulation. In the large ice-streams of some darker glacières, this ice assumed a rather lighter colour by candle-light, but always presented the same granular appearance, and cut up into the same prismatic nuts, and was evidently free from constitutional opacity.

CHAPTER IV.

THE UPPER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S. LIVRES.

We now put ourselves under the guidance of the accomplice, Louis, who began to express doubts of his ability to find the upper glacière, administering consolation by reminding us that if he could not find it no one else could.

As we walked on through the mist and rain, it became necessary to circumvent a fierce-looking bull, and Mignot and the accomplice told rival tales of the dangers to which pedestrians are exposed from the violence of the cattle on some montagnes, where the bulls are allowed to grow to full size and fierceness. Mignot was quite motherly in his advice and his cautions, recommending as the surest safeguard a pocket-pistol, loaded with powder only, to be flashed in the bull's face as he makes his charge. When informed that in England an umbrella or a parasol is found to answer this purpose, he shook his head negatively, evidently having no confidence in his own umbrella, and doubting its obeying his wishes at the critical moment; indeed, it would require a considerable time, and much care and labour, to unfurl a lumbering instrument of that description. He had the best of the tale-contest with Renaud in the end, for he had himself been grazed by a bull which came up with him at the moment when he sprang into a tree.

Before very long we reached a little kennel-like hut of boughs, which no decent dog would have lived in, and no large dog could have entered, and from this we drew a charcoal-burner. No, he said, he did not know the glacière; he had heard that one had been discovered near there, and he had spent hours in searching for it without success. A herdsman on his way from one pasturage to another could give no better help, and we began to despair, till at length Louis desired us to halt in a place sheltered from the rain, while he prosecuted the search alone. We had abundant time for observing that, like other leafy places sheltered from the rain, our resting-place was commanded by huge and frequent drops of water; but at last a joyful Jodel announced the success of the accomplice, and we ran off to join him.

At first sight there was very little to see. Louis had lately been enunciating an opinion that the cave was not worth visiting, and I now felt inclined to agree with him. The general plan appeared to be much the same as in the one we had just left, but the scale was considerably smaller. The pit was not nearly so deep or so large, and, owing to the falling-in of rock and earth at one side, the snow was approached by a winding path with a gradual fall. As soon as the snow was reached, the slope became very steep, and led promptly to an arch in the rock, where the stream of ice began. The cave being shallow, the stream soon came to an end, and, unlike that in the lower glacière, it filled the cave down to the terminal wall, and did not fill it up to the left wall. Here the ground of the cave was visible, strewn with the remains of columns, and showing the thickness of the bottom of the stream to be about 6 feet only. The arch of entrance had evidently been almost closed by a succession of large columns, but these had succumbed to the rain and heat to which they had been exposed by their position.

The left side of the cave, in descending, that is the west side, was comparatively light, being in the line from the arch; but the other side was quite dark, and after a time we found that the ice-stream, instead of terminating as we had supposed with the wall of rock at the end of the cavern, turned off to the right, and was lost in the darkness. Of course candles were brought out, though Louis assured us that he had explored this part of the cave on his previous visit, and had found that the right wall of the cave very soon stopped the stream: we, on the contrary, by tying a candle to a long stick, and thrusting it down the slope of ice, found that the stream passed down extremely steeply, and poured under a narrow and low arch in the wall of the cave, beyond which nothing could be seen. We despatched pieces of ice along the slope, and could hear them whizzing on after they had passed the arch, and landing apparently on stones far below; so I called for the cords, and told Louis that we must cut our way down. But, alas! the cords had been left at the other glacière! One long bag, with a hole in the middle like an old-fashioned purse, had carried the luncheon at one end and the ropes at the other; and when the luncheon was finished, the bag had been stowed away under safe trees till our return. This was of course immensely annoying, and I rang the changes on the few words of abuse which invention or knowledge supplied, as we sat damp and shivering on the verge of the slope, idly sending down pieces of broken columns which brought forth tantalising sounds from the subterranean regions. At length Renaud was moved to shame, and declared that he would cut his way down, rope or no rope; but this seemed so horribly hazardous a proceeding under all the circumstances, that I forbad his attempting it. Seeing, however, that he was determined to do something, we arranged ourselves into an apparatus something like a sliding telescope. Louis cut a first step down the slope, and there took his stand till such time as Mignot got a firm grasp of the tail of his blouse with both hands, I meanwhile holding Mignot's tail with one hand, and the long stick with the candle attached to it with the other; thus professedly supporting the whole apparatus, and giving the necessary light for the work. Even so, we tried again to persuade Renaud to give it up, but he was warmed to his work, and really the arrangement answered remarkably well: when he wished to descend to a new step, Mignot let out a little blouse, and, being himself similarly relieved, descended likewise a step, and then the remaining link of the chain followed. The leader slipped once, but fortunately grasped a projecting piece of rock, for the stream was here confined within narrow walls, and so the strength of the apparatus was not tested; it could scarcely have stood any serious call upon its powers.

After a considerable period of very slow progress, Renaud asked for the candlestick, never more literally a stick than now, and thrust it under the arch, stooping down so as to see what the farther darkness might contain. We above could see nothing, but, after an anxious pause, he cried On peut aller! with a lively satisfaction so completely shared by Mignot, that that worthy person was on the point of letting Renaud's blouse go, in order to indulge in gestures of delight. The step-cutting went on merrily after this announcement, and one by one we came to the arch and passed through, finding it rather a trough than an arch; the breadth was about 4 feet, and the height from 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 feet, and, as we pushed through, our breasts were pressed on to the ice, while our backs scraped against the rock which formed the roof.

As soon as this trough was passed, the ice spread out like a fan, and finally landed us in a subterranean cavern, 72 feet long by 36 feet broad, to which this was the only entrance.

SECOND CAVE OF THE UPPER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S. LIVRES.

The breadth of the fan at the bottom was 27 feet; and near the archway a very striking column poured from a vertical fissure in the wall, and joined the main stream. The fissure was partially open to the cave, and showed the solid round column within the rock: this column measured 18-1/2 feet in circumference, a little below the point where it became free of the fissure, and it had a stream of ice 22 feet long pouring from its base. The colour of the column was unusual, being a dull yellowish green, and the peculiar structure of the ice gave the whole mass the appearance of coursing down very rapidly, as if the water had been frozen while thus moving, and had not therefore ceased so to move. At the bottom of the fan, the flooring of the cave consisted of broken stones for a small space, and then came a black lake of ice, which occupied all the centre of the cave, and afforded us no opportunity of even guessing at its depth. From the manner, however, in which it blended with the stones at its edge, I am not inclined to believe that this depth was anything very great.

Renaud, in his impetuosity, had ceased to cut steps towards the bottom of the slope, and had slipped down the last few feet, of course cutting the remaining steps before attempting to reascend. We found him strutting about the floor of the cave, tossing his wet cap in the air, and crying No one! No one! I the first!, declining to take any part in measurements until the full of his delight and pride had been poured out. He shouted so loud that I was obliged to stop him, lest by some chance the unwonted disturbance of the air should bring down an unstable block from the roof of the arch, and seal us up for ever. There was no sign of incipient thaw in the cave, and the air was very dry, so much so as at once to call attention to the fact. At the farthest end, a lofty dome opened up in the roof; and possibly at some time or other the rock may here fall through, and afford another means of entrance. Beneath this dome a very lovely cluster of columns had grouped itself, formed of the clear porcelain-like ice, and fretted and festooned with the utmost delicacy, as if Andersen's Ice Maiden had been there in one of her amiable moods, and had built herself a palace. This dome in the roof was similar to many which I afterwards observed in other glacières, being a vertical fissure with flutings from top to bottom--not a spherical dome, but of that more elegant shape which the female dress of modern times assumes on a tall person.

Between the base of the circular column and the wall, we found a rare instance of clear jelly-like ice, without any lines external or internal, such as is formed in the open air under very favourable circumstances.

VERTICAL SECTIONS OF THE UPPER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S. LIVRES.

The ordinary number of undergraduate May Terms had afforded various opportunities for studying the comparative clearness of different pieces of ice, but certainly no one ever saw a lemon pippin through an inch and a half of that material so clearly as we now saw the white rock through 1-1/2 feet. Mignot, indeed, said 2 feet; but it was his way to make a large estimate of dimensions, and he constantly interrupted my record of measurements by the assertion that I had made them moins que plus. We were all disappointed by the actual size of the ice-fall which it had cost us so much time and trouble to descend, the distance from the first step to the last being only 26 feet: as this, however, was given by a string stretched from the one point to the other, and not following the concave surface of the ice, the real distance was something more than this.

It was now getting rather late, considering the journey one of us had yet to perform, and we walked quickly away from the glacière, agreeing that it was not improbable that in that part of the Jura there might be many hidden caves containing more or less ice, with no entrance from the world outside, except the fissures which afford a way for the water. The entrance to this cave was so small, that the same physical effect might well be produced by one or two cracks in the rock, such as every one is well acquainted with who has walked on the fissured limestone summits of the lower mountains; and, indeed, Renaud positively affirmed that at the time of his former visit there was not even this entrance to the lower cave, for the ice-stream reached then a higher point of the wall, and completely filled and hid the arch we had discovered. It is very difficult to see how ice can exist in a cave which has no atmospheric communication with the colds of winter, as would apparently be the case with this cave if the one entrance were closed; but where the cracks and small fissures in the rock do provide such communication, there is no reason why we should not imagine all manner of glacial beauties decorating unknown cavities, beyond the general physical law to which all the glacières would seem to be exceptions.

Mignot now became communicative as to the amount of ice supplied by his glacière, the lower of the two we had seen; and his statistics were so utterly confused, that I gave him ten centimes and an address, and charged him to write it all down from his account-book, and send it by post. The letter was accordingly written on July 24, and after trying many unsuccessful addresses in various parts of Switzerland, it finally reached England in the middle of September. It tells its own tale sufficiently well, and is therefore given here with all the mistakes of the original.

'Mon cher Monsieur Browne,--J'ai beaucoup tardé a vous écrire les détails promis, sans doute je ne voulait pas vous oublier; nous sommes affligés dans nôtre maison ma femme et gravement malade ce qui me donne beaucoup de tourment jour et nuit, enfin ce n'est pas ce qui doit faire nôtre entretient.

En 1863. Nous avons exploité comme suit. (Dépenses.)

'Cher Monsieur.--Je ne vous ait pas mis le prix de chaque articles; ni tout-a fait tous les traveaux mais pour vous donner une idée, je veux vous donner connaissance du coût général des dépences pour deux chargements s'élève a 535 francs. Je vous donne aussi connaissance de la quantité de glasse rendue 235 quinteaux a 3 francs, qui produit 705 francs reste net sur ces deux chargements 175 francs: par conséquent mon cher Monsieur je n'ai pas besoin de vous donner des détails des chargements suivants c'est a peu près les mêmes frais, et la quantité de glasse aussi.

'Nous en avons refait trois chargements:--

'Cela comprend toute l'exploitation de 1863.

'Vous m'excuserez beaucoup de mon retard.

'Je termine en vous présentant mes respectueuses salutations. Vous noublierez pas ce que vous mavez promis' [^[22]]St. Georges, le 24 Juillet, 1864. Dimanche.

'JULES MIGNOT.'

Instead of three francs the quintal, Mignot had previously told me that he got four francs, delivered at Gland, and five at Geneva. His ordinary staff during the time of the exploitation was ten men to carry and load, and two to cut the ice in the cave.

It was a matter of considerable importance to catch the Poste at Gimel, and the two Swiss groaned loudly on the consequent pace, unnecessary, as far as they were concerned, for the Poste was nothing to them. As a general rule, the Swiss of this district cannot walk so fast as their Burgundian or French neighbours, unless it is very much to their interest to do so, and then they can go fast enough. A legend is still preserved in the valleys of Joux and Les Rousses, to the following effect. While the Franche Comté was still Spanish, in 1648, commissioners were appointed to fix the boundaries between Berne and Burgundy, on the other side of the range of hill we were now descending, and they decided that one of the boundary stones must be placed at the distance of a common league from the Lake of Les Rousses. Unfortunately, no one could say what a common league was, beyond the vague definition of 'an hour's walk;' so two men were started from the shore of the lake, the one a Burgundian and the other a Swiss, with directions to walk for an hour down the Orbe towards Chenit, the stone to be placed half-way between the points they should respectively reach at the end of the hour. It was for the interest of the Franche Comté that the stone should be as near the lake as possible, and accordingly the Swiss champion made such walking as had never been seen before, and gained for Berne a considerable amount of territory. There was no such tragic result in this case as that which induced the Carthaginians to pay divine honours to the brothers whose speed, on a like occasion, had added an appreciable amount to the possessions of the republic.

At length we reached the point where the roads for Gimel and S. Georges separate, and there, under a glorious sapin, we said our adieux, and wished our au revoirs, and settled those little matters which the best friends must settle, when one is of the nature of a monsieur, and the others are guides. They burdened their souls with many politenesses, and so we parted. The inclemency of the weather was such, that the people in the lower country asked, as they passed, whether snow had fallen in the mountains, and the cold rain continued unceasingly down to the large plain on which the Federal Camp of Bière[^[23]] is placed. Here for a few moments the sun showed itself, lighting up the white tents, and displaying to great advantage the masses of scented orchises, and the feathery reine-des-prés, which hemmed the road in on either side. All through the earlier part of the day, flowers had forced themselves upon our notice as mere vehicles for collected rain, when we came in contact with them; but now, for a short time, they resumed their proper place,--only for a short time, for the rain soon returned, and did not cease till midnight. Not all the garden scenery about Aubonne and Allaman (ad Lemannum), nor all the vineyards which yield the choice white wine of the Côte, could counterbalance the united discomfort of the rain, and the cold which had got into the system in the two glacières; and matters were not mended by the discovery that Bradshaw was treacherous, and that a junction with dry baggage at Neufchâtel could not be effected before eleven at night.

There are some curious natural phenomena in this neighbourhood, due to the subterranean courses which the fissured limestone of the Jura affords to the meteoric waters. Not far from Bière, the river Aubonne springs out at the bottom of an amphitheatre of rock, receiving additions soon after from a group of twenty natural pits, which the peasants call unfathomable--an epithet freely applied to the strange holes found in the Jura. It is remarkable that the way seems to stand at different levels in the various pits.[^[24]] The plain of Champagne, in which they occur, is unlike the surrounding soil in being formed of calcareous detritus, evidently brought down by some means or other from the Jura, and is dry and parched up to the very edges of the pits. The Toleure, a tributary of the Aubonne, frequently large enough to be called a confluent, flows out from the foot of a wall of rock composed of regular parallelopipeds, and in the spring, when the snows are melting freely, its sources burst out at various levels of the rock. Farther to the west, the Versoie, famous for its trout, pours forth a full-sized stream near the Château of Divonne, which is said to take its name (Divorum unda) from this phenomenon. Passing to the northern slope of this range of the Jura, the Orbe is a remarkable example of the same sort of thing, flowing out peacefully in very considerable bulk from an arch at the bottom of a perpendicular rock of great height. This river no doubt owes its origin to the superfluous waters of the Lake of Brenets, which have no visible outlet, and sink into fissures and entonnoirs in the rock at the edge of the lake. Notwithstanding that the lake is three-quarters of a league distant, horizontally, and nearly 700 feet higher, the belief had always been that it was the source of the stream, and in 1776 this was proved to be the fact. For some years before that date, the waters of the Lake of Joux had been inconveniently high, and the people determined to clean out the entonnoirs and fissures of the Lake of Brenets, which is only separated from the Lake of Joux by a narrow tongue of land, in the expectation that the water would then pass away more freely. In order to reach the fissures, they dammed up the outlet of the upper into the lower lake; but the pressure on the embankment became too great, and the waters burst through with much violence, creating an immense disturbance in the lake; and the Orbe, which had always been perfectly clear, was troubled and muddy for some little time. The source of the Loue, near Pontarlier, is more striking than even that of the Orbe.[^[25]]

CHAPTER V.

THE GLACIÈRE OF THE GRÂCE-DIEU, OR LA BAUME, NEAR BESANÇON.

The grand and lovely scenery of the Val de Travers has at length been opened up for the ordinary tourist world, by the railway which connects Pontarlier with Neufchâtel. The beauties of the valley are an unfortunate preparation for the dull expanse of ugly France which greets the traveller passing north from the former town; but the country soon assumes a pleasanter aspect, and nothing can be more charming than the soft green slopes, dotted with the richest pines, which form the approach to the station of Boujeailles. It is impossible for the most careless traveller to avoid observing the ill effects produced upon the trees on the south side of the forest of Chaux, by the crowded and neglected state in which they have been left, and the wet state of the soil. The branches become covered with moss, which first kills them, and then breaks them off, so that many tall and tapering sapins point their heads to the sky with trunks wholly guiltless of branches; while in other cases, where decay has not yet gone so far, the branches wear the appearance of gigantic stags' horns, with the velvet; and when a number of these interlace, the mosses unite in large dark patches, giving a cedar-like air to the scene of ruin.

Up to this point, an elderly Frenchman in the carriage had been extremely offensive, from the evil odour of his Macintosh coat; but in answer to a remark upon the improvement which the railway would effect, by providing ventilation for the forest, he gave so much information on that subject, and gave it so pleasantly, and had evidently so good a knowledge of the topography of Franche Comté, that his coat speedily lost its smell, and we became excellent friends.

It is a tantalising thing to be whirled on a hot and dusty day through districts famous for their wines, the dust and heat standing out in more painful colours by contrast with the recollection of cooling draughts which other occasions have owed to such vineyards; though, after all, the true method of facing heat with success is to drink no wine. At any rate, the vineyards of Arbois must always be interesting, and if the stories of the Templars' orgies be true, we may be sure that the chapelry which they possessed in that town would be a favourable place of residence with the order; possibly Rule XVI. might there be somewhat relaxed. 'The good wine of Arbois,' la meilleure cave de Bourgougne, a judicious old writer says, had free entry into all the towns of the Comté; and when Burgundy was becoming imperial, Maximilian extended this privilege through all the towns of the empire. A hundred years later, it had so high a character, that the troops of Henri IV. turned away from the town, announcing that they did not wish to attack ceulx estoient du naturel de leur vin, qui frappe partout;[^[26]] and the king was forced to come himself, with his constable and marshals, to beat down the walls, in the course of which undertaking his men felt the vigour of the inhabitants to a greater extent than he liked. It is said that when he had taken the town, the municipality received him in state, and supplied him with wine of the country. He praised the wine very highly, on which one of the body had the ill taste to assure him that they had a better wine than that. 'You keep it, perhaps,' was the royal rebuke, 'for a better occasion.' Henry had a great opinion of this wine; and the Duc de Sully states, in his Memoirs, that when the Duc de Mayenne retired from the league against the king, and came to Monceaux to tender his allegiance, Henry punished him for past offences by walking so fast about the grounds of the château, that the poor duke, what with his sciatica, and what with his fat, at last told him with an expressive gesture that a minute more of it would kill him. The king thereupon let him go, and promised him some vin d'Arbois to set him right again.[^[27]]

The present appearance of the town, as seen from the high level followed by the railway, scarcely recalls the time when Arbois was known as le jardin de noblesse, and Barbarossa dated thence his charters, or Jean Sans-peur held there the States of Burgundy. Gollut[^[28]] tells a story of a dowager of Arbois, mother-in-law to Philip V. and Charles IV. of France, which outdoes legend of Bishop Hatto. Mahaut d'Artois was an elderly lady remarkable for her charities, and was by consequence always surrounded by large crowds of poor folk during her residence at the Châtelaine, the ruins of which lie a mile or two from Arbois. On the occasion of a severe famine in Burgundy, she collected a band of her mendicant friends in a stable, and burned them all, saying that 'par pitié elle hauoit faict cela, considerant les peines que ces pauvres debuoient endurer en temps de si grande et tant estrange famine.'

There is a Val d'Amour near Arbois, but the more beautiful valley of that name lies between Dôle and Besançon, and, as we passed its neighbourhood, my friend with the Macintosh informed me that as it was clear from my questions that I was drawing up a history of the Franche Comté, he must beg me to insert a legend respecting the origin of this name, Val d'Amour, which, he believed, had never appeared in print. I disclaimed the history, but accepted the legend, and here it is:--The Seigneur of Chissey was to marry the heiress of a neighbouring seigneurie, and, it is needless to add, she was very lovely, and he was handsome and brave. A lake separated the two châteaux, and the young man not unfrequently returned by water rather late in the evening; and so it fell out that one night he was drowned. The lady naturally grieved sorely for her loss, and put in train all possible means for recovering her lover's body. Time, however, passed on, and no success attended her efforts, till at length she caused the hills which dammed up the waters to be pierced, and then De Chissey was found. A village sprang up near the outlet thus made, and took thence its name Percée, or, as men now spell it, Parcey; and the rich vegetation which speedily covered the valley, where once the lake had been, gave it such an air of happiness and beauty, that the people remembered its origin, and called it the Valley of Love. It is a fact that Parcy was not always so spelled, for Noble Constantin Thiehault, Sieur de Perrecey, was a witness to the treaty for the transference of a miraculous host from Faverney to Dôle in 1608, and old maps and books give it as Perrecey and Parrecey indifferently. The De Chisseys, whose names may be found among the female prebends of Château-Chalon, with its necessary sixteen quarters, filled a considerable place in the history of the Comté from the Crusades downwards, and known as les Fols de Chissey, the brave[^[29]] and dashing, and witty De Chisseys--qualities which no doubt were possessed by the poor young man for whom the fair Chatelaine drained the Val d'Amour.

As we drew nearer to Besançon, each turn of the small streams, and each low rounded hill, might have served as an illustration to Cæsar's 'Commentaries.' Now at length it was seen how, whatever the result of a battle, there was always a proximus collis for the conquered party to retire to; and it would have been easy to find many suitable scenes for the critical engagement, where the woods sloped down to a strip of grass-land between their foot and the stream.

The Frenchman knew his Cæsar, but he put that general in the fourth century B.C. He made mistakes, too, in quoting him, which were easily detected by a memory bristling with the details of his phraseology, the indelible result of extracting the principal parts of his verbs, and the nominatives of his irregular nouns, from half a dozen generations of small boys. He promised me a rich Julian feast in Besançon, and was greatly affected when he found that the Englishman could give him Cæsar's description of his native town. He wholly denied the amphitheatre with which one of our handbooks has gifted it; and this denial was afterwards echoed by every one in Besançon, some even thinking it necessary to explain the difference between an amphitheatre and an arch of triumph, the latter still existing in the town. The Jesuit Dunod relates that the amphitheatre was to be seen at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in the ruined state in which the Alans and Vandals had left it after their successful siege in 406. It seems to have stood near the present site of the Madeleine.

It was a great satisfaction to find that the Frenchman had himself visited the glacière which was the object of my search, and was able to give some idea as to the manner of reaching it, for my information on the subject was confined to a vague notice that there was an ice-cave five leagues from Besançon. As so often happened in other cases, he advised me not to go to it, but rather, if I must see a cave, to go to the Grotto of Ocelles,[^[30]] a collection of thirty or more caverns and galleries near the Doubs, below Besançon. Seeing, however, that I was bent on visiting the glacière, he advised me not to go on Sunday, for the Cardinal Archbishop had ordered the Trappists at the Chartreuse near not to receive guests on that day; while Saturday, he thought, was almost as bad, for nothing better than an omelette could be obtained on days of abstinence. Saturday, then, was clearly the day to be chosen.

The first sight of Besançon explains at once why Cæsar was so anxious to forestall Ariovistus by occupying Vesontio, although the hill on which the citadel stands is not so striking as the similar hill at Salins, and the engines of modern warfare would promptly print their telegrams on every stone and man in the place, from the neighbouring heights. The French Government has wisely taken warning from the bombardment by the Allies, and has covered the heights which command it on either side with friendly fortifications, in which lie the keys of the place. Historically, Besançon is a place of great interest. It witnessed the catastrophe of Julius Vindex, who had made terms with Rufus, the general sent against him by Nero, but was attacked by the troops of Rufus before they learned the alliance concluded between the two generals. Vindex was so much grieved by the slaughter of his troops, and the blow thus struck, by an unhappy accident, at his designs against the emperor, that he put himself to death at the gates of the town, while the fight was still going on.[^[31]] The Bisuntians claim to themselves the glory acquired by the Sequani, whose chief city Vesontio was, by the overthrow of Julius Sabinus, who asserted that he was the grandson of a son of Julius Cæsar, and proclaimed himself emperor in the time of Vespasian. The Sequani proceeded against him of their own accord, and conquered him in the interest of the reigning emperor; and he and his wife Peponilla lived hid in a tomb for nine years. Here two sons were born to them; and when they were all discovered and carried to Rome, Peponilla prettily told the emperor that she had brought up two sons in the tomb, in order that there might be other voices to intercede for her husband's life besides her own. They were, however, put to death.[^[32]]

To judge from the style of the hotels, Besançon is not visited by many English travellers; and yet it well repays a visit, providing those who care for such things with a full average of vaulted passages, and feudal gateways, and arcaded court-yards, with much less than the average of evil smell. There are gates of all shapes and times--Louis-Quatorze towers, and fortifications specially constructed under Vauban's own eye; while the approach to the town, from the land side, is by a tunnel, cut through the live rock which forms a solid chord to the arc described by the course of the river Doubs. This excavation, called appropriately the Porte Taillée, is attributed by the various inhabitants to pretty nearly all the famous emperors and kings who have lived from Julius Cæsar to Louis XIV.: it owes its origin, no doubt, to the construction of the aqueduct which formerly brought into the town the waters pouring out of the rock at Arcier, two leagues from Besançon, and was the work probably of M. Aurelius and L. Verus. Local antiquaries assign the aqueduct to Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus, apparently for no better reason than because he built a similar work in Rome. The arch of triumph[^[33]] at the entrance to the upper town has been an inexhaustible subject of controversy for many generations of antiquaries, and up to the time of Dunod was generally attributed to Aurelian: that historian, however, believed that its sculptures represented the education of Crispus, the son of Constantine, and that the name Chrysopolis, by which Besançon was very generally known in early times, was only a corruption of Crispopolis. Earlier writers are in favour of the natural derivation of Chrysopolis, and assert that when the Senones lost their famous chief, the Brennus of Roman history, before Delphos, they built a town where Byzantium afterwards stood, and called it Bisantium and Chrysopolis, in memory of their city of those names at home.

The Hôtel du Nord is a rambling old house, comfortable after French ideas of comfort, and rejoicing in an excellent cuisine; though it is true that on one occasion, at least, haricots verts à l'Anglaise meant a mass of fibrous greens, swimming in a most un-English sea of artificial fat. It is a good place for studying the natural manners of the untravelled Frenchman, who there sits patiently at the table, for many minutes before dinner is served, with his napkin tucked in round his neck, and his countenance composed into a look of much resignation. The waiters are for the most part shock-headed boys, in angular-tail coats well up in the back of the neck, who frankly confess, when any order out of the common run of orders is given, that a German patois from the left bank of the Rhine is their only extensive language. One of these won my eternal gratitude by providing a clean fork at a crisis between the last savouries and the plat doux; for the usual practice with the waiters, when anyone neglected to secure his knife and fork for the next course, was to slip the plate from under the unwonted charge, and leave those instruments sprawling on the tablecloth in a vengeful mess of gravy. Chickens' bones were there dealt with on all sides as nature perhaps intended that they should be dealt with, namely, by taking them between finger and thumb, and removing superfluities with the teeth; and French officers with wasp-like waists, and red trousers gathered in plaits to match, boldly despised the sophistication of spoons, and ate their vanilla cream like men, by the help of bread and fingers. The manners and broken French of the stranger formed an open and agreeable subject of conversation, and the table was much quieter than a Frenchman's table d'hôte is sometimes known to be: on one occasion, however, all decorum was scattered to the winds, and the guests rushed out into the court-yard with disordered bibs and tuckers, on the announcement by the head waiter of a 'chien à l'Anglaise, not so high as a mustard-pot,' which one of the company promptly bought for twenty-four francs, commencing its education on the spot by a lesson in cigar-smoking.

It frequently happens in France that café noir is a much more ready and abundant tap than water, and so it was here; notwithstanding which, the bedroom apparatus was most comfortable and complete. The chambermaid was a boy, and under his auspices a sheet of postage-stamps and a lead pencil vanished from the table. When it was suggested to him that possibly they had been blown into some corner, and so swept away, he brought a dustpan from a distant part of the house, and miraculously discovered the stamps perched upon a small handful of dust therein, deferring the discovery and his consequent surprise till he reached my room. It was curious that the stamps, which had before been in an open sheet, were now folded neatly together, and curled into the shape of a waistcoat-pocket. He was inexorable about the pencil.

No certain information could be obtained in the hotel respecting the glacière; so an owner of carriages was summoned, and consulted as to the best means of getting there. He naturally recommended that one of his own carriages should be taken as far as the Abbey of Grâce-Dieu, and that we should start at five o'clock the next morning, with a driver who knew the way to the glacière from the point at which the carriage must be left.[^[34]] Five o'clock seemed very early for a drive of fifteen miles; but the man asserted that instead of five leagues it was a good seven or eight, and so it turned out to be. This glacière may be called a historical glacière, being the only one which has attracted general attention; and the mistake about its distance from Besançon arose very many years ago, and has been perpetuated by a long series of copyists. The distance may not be more than five leagues when measured on the map with a ruler; but until the tunnels and via-ducts necessary for a crow line are constructed, the world must be content to call it seven and a half at least. The man bargained for two days' pay for the carriage, on the plea that the horse would be so tired the next day that he would not be able to do any work, and as that day was Sunday, the great day for excursions, it would be a dead loss. It so happened that the charge for two days, fifteen francs, was exactly what I paid elsewhere for one day, so there was no difficulty about the price.

We started, accordingly, at five o'clock. The day was delightfully fine, and in spite of the driver's peculiarity of speech, caused by a short tongue, and aggravated by a villanous little black pipe clutched between his remaining teeth, we got through a large amount of question and answer respecting the country through which we passed. Of course, the reins were carried through rings low down on the kicking-strap, ingeniously placed so that each whisk of the horse's tail caught one or other rein; and then the process of extraction was a somewhat dangerous one, for there was no splashboard, and the driver had to stow his legs away out of reach, before commencing operations. The landlord of the inn at Mühlinen, on the road from Kandersteg to Thun, has a worse arrangement than even this, both reins passing through one small leather loop at the top of the kicking-strap; so that when the horse on one occasion ran away down a steep hill in consequence of the break refusing to act, the man in his flurry could not tell which rein to pull, to steer clear of the wall of rock on one side, and the unfenced slope on the other, and finally flung himself out in despair, leaving his English cargo behind.

There has evidently been at some time a vast lake near Besançon, and the old bottom of the lake is now covered with heavy meadow-grass, while the corn-fields and villages creep down from the higher grounds, on the remains of promontories which stretch out into the plain. The people are in constant fear of inundation, and the driver informed me that in winter large parts of the plain are flooded, the superfluous waters vanishing after a time into a great hole, whose powers of digestion he could not explain. The villages which lie on the shores, as it were, of the lake, rejoice in church-towers with bulbous domes, rising out of rich clusters of trees, and the early bells rang out through the crisp air with something of a Belgian sweetness. Farther on, the road passed through glorious wheat, clean as on an English model farm, save where some picturesque farmer had devoted a corner to the growth of poppies. Here, as elsewhere, potatoes did not grow in ridges, but each root had a little hillock to itself; an unnatural early training which may account for the strange appearance of pommes de terre au naturel.

Anyone who has driven through the morning air for an hour or two before breakfast, will understand the satisfaction with which, about seven o'clock, we deciphered a complicated milestone into 14 kilomètres from Besançon, which meant breakfast at the next village, Nancray. The breakfast was simple enough, owing to the absence of butter and other things, and consisted of coffee in its native pot, and dry bread: the milk was set on the table in the pan in which it had been boiled, and a soup-ladle and a French wash-hand basin took the place of cup and spoon. A cat kept the door against sundry large and tailless dogs, whose appetites had not gone with their tails; and an old woman kindly delivered a lecture on the most approved method of making a ptisan from the flowers of the lime-tree, and on the many medicinal properties of that decoction, to which she attributed her good health at so advanced an age. I silently supplemented her peroration by attributing her garrulity to a more stimulating source.

When we started again, it was time to learn something about the scene of our further proceedings, and the driver enunciated his views on monks in general, à propos to the Convent of Grâce-Dieu, the Chartreuse at which we were to leave our carriage, and obtain food for man and horse. The Brothers, he said, were possessed of many mills, and were in consequence enormously rich. Among the products of their industry, a liqueur known as Chartreuse seemed to fill a high place in his esteem, for he considered it to be better--and he said it as if that comparative led into an eighth heaven--better even than absinthe. I had an opportunity of tasting this liqueur some weeks after, a few minutes below the summit of Mont Blanc, and certainly no one would suspect its great strength, which is entirely disguised by an innocent and insidious sweetness, as unlike absinthe as anything can possibly be: impressions, however, respecting meat and drink, and all other matters, are not very trustworthy when received near the top of the Calotte. It has lately been found that the worthy Brothers of the Grande Chartreuse have been systematically defrauding the revenue, by returning their profits on the manufacture of this liqueur at something merely nominal as compared with the real gains. I could not learn whether the ceremony of blessing each batch of the liqueur, before sending it out to intoxicate the world, is performed with so much solemnity at Grâce-Dieu as at Grenoble; and, indeed, it rests only on the assertion of the short-tongued Bisuntian that the manufacture is carried on at all at the former place.[^[35]]

Having communicated such information as he possessed, the man seemed to think he had a right to learn something in return, and administered various questions respecting customs which he believed to prevail in England. He evidently did not credit the denial of the truth of what he had heard, nor yet the assertion, in answer to another question, that English hothouse grapes are three or four times as large as the ordinary grapes of France, and well-flavoured in at least a like proportion. The roadside was planted with apple-trees, and these were overgrown with mistletoe; so, by way of correcting his idea that the English are a sad and gloomy people, I informed him of the use made of this parasite by young people in the country at Christmas-time. Instead, however, of being thereby impressed with our national liveliness, he looked with a sort of supercilious contempt upon a people who could require the intervention or sanction of anything external in such a matter, and turned the conversation to some more worthy subject.

At length we passed into a pleasant valley, with thrushes singing, and much chirping of those smaller birds, in the murder of which, sitting, consists le sport in the eyes of many gentlemen of France. Up to this point, nothing could have been more unlike the scenery which I had so far found to be associated with glacières; but now the country became slightly more Jurane, and limestone precipices on a small scale rose up on either hand, decked with the corbel towers which result from the weathering of the rock. It was the Jura in softer as well as smaller type, for all the desolate wildness which characterises the more rocky part of that range was gone, and there were no signs of the grand pine-scenery, or needle-foliage, as the Germans call it; the trees were all oak and ash and beech, and the rocks were much more neat and orderly, and of course less grand, than their contorted kindred farther south. The valley speedily became very narrow, and a final bend brought us face-to-face with the buildings of the Abbaye de Grâce-Dieu, striking from their position--filling, as they do, the breadth of the valley,--but in no way remarkable architecturally. The journey had been so long that it was now ten o'clock; and as we were due in Besançon at five in the evening, we put the horse up as quickly as possible, in a shed provided by the Brothers, and set off on foot for the glacière, half an hour distant. About a mile and a half from the convent, the valley comes to an end, the rocks on the opposite sides approaching so close to each other as only to leave room for a large flour-mill, belonging to the Brothers, and for the escape-channel of the stream which works the mill. This building is quite new, and might almost be taken for a fortification against inroads by the head of the valley, especially as the words Posuerunt me custodem appear on the face, applying, however, to an image of the Virgin, which presides over the establishment. The monks have expended their superfluous time and energies upon the erection of crosses of all sizes on every projecting peak and point of rock, one cross more sombre than the rest marking the scene of a recent death. As I had no means of determining the elevation of this district above the sea,[^[36]] I made enquiries as to the climate in winter; and one of the Brothers told me, that it was an unusual thing with them to have a fall of snow amounting to two joints of a remarkably dirty finger.

At the mill, the path turns up the steep wooded hill on the right, and leads through young plantations to a small cottage near the glacière, where the plantations give place to a well-grown beech wood. Here my conductor startled me by announcing that there was 20 centimes to pay to the farmer of the cave for entrance; an announcement which seemed to take all the pleasure out of the expedition, and invested it with the disagreeable character of sightseeing. The poor driver thought, no doubt, with some trepidation upon the small amount of pour-boire he could expect from a monsieur on whom a demand for two pence produced so serious an effect, and it was difficult to make him understand that the fact and not the amount of payment was the trouble. When I illustrated this by saying that I would gladly give a franc to be allowed to enter the glacière free, he seemed to think that if I would entrust him with the franc, he might possibly arrange that little matter for me.

The immediate approach to the glacière is very impressive. The surface of the ground slopes slightly upwards, and the entrance, from north to south, is by a broad inclined plane, of gentle fall at first, which rapidly becomes steep enough to require zigzags. The walls of rock on either side are very sheer, and increase of course in height as the plane of entrance falls. The whole length of the slope is about 420 feet, and down a considerable part of this some grasses and flowers are to be found: the last 208 feet are covered more or less with ice; though, at the time of my visit, the furious rains of the end of June, 1864, had washed down a considerable amount of mud, and so covered some of the ice. There were no ready means of determining the thickness of this layer of ice, for the descent of which ten or eleven zigzags had been made by the farmer. In one place, within 24 feet of its upper commencement, it was from 2-1/2 to 3 feet thick; but the prominence of that part seemed to mark it out as of more than the average thickness. Even where to all appearance there was nothing but mud and earth, an unexpected fall or two showed that all was ice below. Whether the driver had previously experienced the treacherousness of this slope of ice, or whatever his motive might be, he left me to enter and explore alone.

The roof of the entrance is at first a mere shell, formed by the thin crust of rock on which the surface-earth and trees rest high overhead; but this rapidly becomes thicker, as shown in the section of the cave, and thus a sort of outer cave is formed, the real portal of the glacière being reached about 60 feet above the bottom of the slope. This outer cave presents a curious appearance, from the distinctness with which the several strata of the limestone are marked, the lower strata weathered and rounded off like the seats of an amphitheatre of the giants, and all, up to the shell-like roof, arranged in horizontal semicircles of various graduated sizes, showing their concavity; while at the bottom of the whole is seen a patch of darkness, with two masses of ice in its centre, looming out like grey ghosts at midnight. This darkness is of course the inner cave, the entrance to which, though it seems so small from above, is 78 feet broad.

The glacière itself may be said to commence as soon as this entrance, or perpendicular portal, is passed, and thus includes 60 feet of the long slope of ice, from the foot of which to the farther end of the cave is 145 feet, the greatest breadth of the cave being 148 feet.

VERTICAL SECTION OF THE GLACIÈRE OF GRÂCE-DIEU, NEAR BESANÇON.

Immediately below the portal I found a piece of the trunk of a large column of ice, 7 feet long and 12 feet in girth, its fractured ends giving the idea of the interior of a quickly-grown tree, in consequence of the concentric arrangement of convergent prisms described in the account of the Glacière of S. Georges. The wife of the farmer told me afterwards that there had been two glorious columns at this portal, which the recent rains had swept away. Excepting a short space at the foot of the slope, and another towards the farther end of the cave, the floor was covered with ice, in some parts from 3 to 4 feet thick: of this a considerable area had been removed to a depth of 2 1/2 or 3 feet, leaving a pond of water a foot deep, with bottom and banks of ice. The rock which composes the true floor rises at the farthest end of the cave, and the roof is so arranged that a sort of private chapel is there formed; and from a fissure in the dome a monster column of ice had been constructed on the floor, which, at the time of my visit, had lost its upper parts, and stood as a hollow truncated cone with sides a foot thick, and with seas of ice streaming from it, and covering the rising pavement of the chapel. Without an axe, and without help, I was unable to measure the girth of this column, which had not been without companions on a smaller scale in the immediate neighbourhood. At the west end of the cave, the wall was thickly covered for a large space with small limestone stalactites, producing the effect of many tiers of fringe on a shawl; while from a dark fissure in the roof a large piece of fluted drapery of the same material hung, calling to mind some of the vastly grander details of the grottoes of Hans-sur-Lesse in Belgium: down this wall there was also a long row of icicles, on the edges of a narrow fissure. The north-west corner was very dark, and an opening in the wall of rock high above the ground suggested a tantalising cave up there: the ground in this corner was occupied by the shattered remains of numerous columns of ice, which had originally covered a circular area between 60 and 70 feet in circumference.

The three large masses of ice which rendered this glacière in some respects more remarkable than any of those I have seen, lay in a line from east to west, across the middle of the cave, on that part of the floor where the ice was thickest. The central mass was extremely solid, but somewhat unmeaning in shape, being a rough irregular pyramid; its size alone, however, was sufficient to make it very striking, the girth being 66-1/2 feet at some distance from the ice-floor with which it blended. The mass which lay to the east of this was very lovely, owing to the good taste of some one who had found that much ice was wont to accumulate on that spot, and had accordingly fixed the trunk of a small fir-tree, with the upper branches complete, to receive the water from the corresponding fissure in the roof. The consequence was, that, while the actual tree had vanished from sight under its icy covering, excepting on one side where a slight investigation betrayed its presence, the mass of ice showed every possible fantasy of form which a mould so graceful could suggest. At the base, it was solid, with a circumference of 37 feet. The huge column, which had collected round the trunk of the fir-tree, branched out at the top into all varieties of eccentricity and beauty, each twig of the different boughs becoming, to all appearance, a solid bar of frosted ice, with graceful curve, affording a point of suspension for complicated groups of icicles, which streamed down side by side with emulous loveliness. In some of the recesses of the column, the ice assumed a pale blue colour; but as a rule it was white and very hard, not so regularly prismatic as the ice described in former glacières, but palpably crystalline, showing a structure not unlike granite, with a bold grain, and with a large predominance of the glittering element. But the westernmost mass was the grandest and most beautiful of all. It consisted of two lofty heads, like weeping willows in Carrara marble, with three or four others less lofty, resembling a family group of lions' heads in a subdued attitude of grief, richly decked with icy manes. Similar heads seemed to grow out here and there from the solid sides of the huge mass. The girth was 76 1/2 feet, measured about 2 feet from the floor. When this column was looked at from the side removed from the entrance to the cave, so that it stood in the centre of the light which poured down the long slope from the outer world, the transparency of the ice brought it to pass that the whole seemed set in a narrow frame of impalpable liquid blue, the effect of light penetrating through the mass at its extreme edges. The only means of determining the height of this column was by tying a stone to the end of a string, and lodging it on the highest head; but this was not an easy process, as I was naturally anxious not to injure the delicate beauty which made that head one of the loveliest things conceivable; and each careful essay with the stone seemed to involve as much responsibility as taking a shot at a hostile wicket, in a crisis of the game, instead of returning the ball in the conventional manner. When at last it was safely lodged, the height proved to be 27 feet. I had hoped to find it much more than this, from the grandeur of the effect of the whole mass, and I took the trouble to measure the knotted string again with a tape, to make sure that there was no mistake. The column formed upon the fir-tree was 3 or 4 feet lower.

I have since found many notices of this glacière in the Memoirs of the French Academy and elsewhere, extracts from which will be found in a later chapter. These accounts are spread over a period of 200 years, extending from 1590 to 1790, and almost all make mention of the columns or groups of columns I have described; but, without exception, the heights given or suggested in the various accounts are much less than those which I obtained as the result of careful measurement. The latest description of a visit to the glacière states a fact which probably will be held to explain, the present excess of height above that of earlier times.[^[37]] The citizen Girod-Chantrans, who wrote this description, had procured the notes of a medical man living in the neighbourhood, from which it seemed that Dr. Oudot made the experiment, in 1779, of fixing stakes of wood in the heads of the columns, then from 4 to 5 feet high, and found that these stakes were the cause of a very large increase in the height of the columns, ice gathering round them in pillars a foot thick. So that it is not improbable that the largest of the three masses of the present day owes its height, and its peculiar form, to a series of stakes fixed from time to time in the various heads formed under the fissures in the roof, though nothing but the most solid ice can now be seen. It would be very interesting to try this experiment in one of the caves where, without any artificial help, such immense masses of ice are formed; and by this means columns might, in the course of a year or two, be raised to the very roof. Further details on this subject will be given hereafter.

There was no perceptible draught of air in any part of the cave, and the candles burned steadily through the whole time of my visit, which occupied more than two hours. The centre was sufficiently lighted by the day; but in the western corner, and behind the largest column, artificial light was necessary. The ice itself did not generally show signs of thawing, but the whole cave was in a state of wetness, which made the process of measuring and investigating anything but pleasant. I had placed two thermometers at different points on my first entrance--one on a drawing-board on a large stone in the middle of the pond of water which has been mentioned, and the other on a bundle of pencils at the entrance of the end chapel, in a part of the cave where the ice-floor ceased for a while, and left the stones and rock bare. The former gave 33°, the latter, till I was on the point of leaving, 31 1/2°, when it fell suddenly to 31°. It was impossible, however, to stay any longer for the sake of watching the thermometer fall lower and lower below the freezing point; indeed, the results of sundry incautious fathomings of the various pools of water, and incessant contact of hands and feet with the ice, had already become so unpleasant, that I was obliged to desert my trusty hundred feet of string, and leave it lying on the ice, from want of finger-power to roll it up. The thermometers were both Casella's, but that which registered 31° was the more lively of the two, the other being mercurial, with a much thicker stem: the difference in sensitiveness was so great, that when they were equally exposed to the sun in driving home, the one ran up to 93° before the other had reached 85°.

In leaving the glacière, I found a little pathway turning off along the face of the rock on the left hand, a short way up the slope of entrance, and looking as if it might lead to the opening in the dark wall on the western side of the cave. After a time, however, it came to a corner which it seemed an unnecessary risk to attempt to pass alone; and my prudence was rewarded by the discovery that, after all, the supposed cave could not be thus reached. It is said that this other cave was the place to which the inhabitants fled for refuge when their district was invaded, probably by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar with his 10,000 Swedes, and that a ladder 40 feet long is necessary for getting at it.

The driver had long ago absconded when I returned to the upper regions; but the wife of the farmer of the grotto was there, and communicated all that she knew of the statistics of the ice annually removed. She said that in 1863 two chars were loaded every day for two months, each char taking about 600 kilos, the wholesale price in Besançon being 5 francs the hundred kilos. Since the quintal contains 50 kilos, it will be seen that this account does not agree with the statement of Renaud as to the amount of ice each char could take. No doubt, a char at S. Georges may mean one thing, and a char in the village of Chaux another; but the difference between 12 quintaux and 50 or 60 is too great to be thus explained, and probably Madame Briot made some mistake. Her husband, Louis Briot, works alone in the cave, and has twelve men and a donkey to carry the ice he quarries to the village of Chaux, a mile from the glacière, where it is loaded for conveyance to Besançon. He uses gunpowder for the flooring of ice, and expects the eighth part of a pound to blow out a cubic metre; and if, by ill luck, the ice thus procured has stones on the lower side, he has to saw off the bottom layer. Madame Briot said I was right in supposing March to be the great time for the formation of ice, as she had heard her husband say that the columns were higher then than at any other time of the year: she also confirmed my views as to the disastrous effects of heavy rain. As with every other glacière of which I could obtain any account, excepting the Lower Glacière of the Pré de S. Livres, she complained that the ice had not been so beautiful and so abundant this year as last, although the winter had been exceptionally severe.

CHAPTER VI.

BESANÇON AND DÔLE.

The afternoon was so far advanced when I returned to the convent, that it was clearly impossible to reach Besançon at five o'clock, and consequently there was time to inspect the Brothers and their buildings. The field near the convent was gay with haymakers; and the brown monks, with here and there a priest in ci-devant white, moved among the hired labourers, and stirred them up by exhortation and example,--with this difference, that while it was evidently the business of the monks so to do, the priests, on the other hand, had only taken fork in hand for the sake of a little gentle exercise. One unhappy Jacques Bonhomme made hot and toilsome hay in thick brown clothes, plainly manufactured from a defunct Brother's gown; for, to judge from appearances, a cast-off gown is a thing unknown. It was good to see a Brother, in horn spectacles of mediæval cut, tenderly chopping a log for firewood, and peering at it through his spectacles after each stroke, as a man examines some delicate piece of natural machinery with a microscope; to see another Brother, the sphere of whose duties lay in the flour-mill, standing in the doorway with brown robe and shaven crown all powdered alike with white, and a third covered from head to foot with sawdust; or, best of all, to see an antique Brother, with scarecrow legs, and low shoes which had presumably been in his possession or that of his predecessors for a long series of years, wheeling a barrow of liquid manure, with his gown looped up high by means of stout whipcord and an arrangement of large brass rings. The Brother whose business it was to do such cooking as might be required by visitors, grinned in the most friendly and engaging manner from ear to ear when he was looked at; and, by fixing him steadily with the eye, he could be kept for considerable spaces of time standing in the middle of the kitchen, knife in hand, with the corners of his mouth out of sight round his broad cheeks. His ample front was decked with a blue apron, suspended from his shoulders, and confined round the convexity of his waist by an old strap which no respectable costermonger would have used as harness. The soup served was by courtesy called soupe maigre, but it was in fact soupe maigre diluted by many homoeopathic myriads, and the Brother showed much curiosity as to my opinion of its taste--a curiosity which I could not satisfy without hurting his professional pride. When that course was finished, the large-faced cook suggested an omelette, as the most substantial thing allowed on eves, proceeding to draw the materials from a closet which so fully shared in the general abstinence from water as a means of cleansing, that I shut my eyes upon all further operations, and ate the eventual omelette in faith. Its excellence called forth such hearty commendations, that there seemed to be some danger of the mouth not coming right again. Then salads, and bread and butter, and wine, and various kinds of cheese were brought, which made in all a very fair dinner for a fast-day.

The culinary monk knew nothing of the history of his convent, beyond the bare year of its foundation, and displayed a monotonous dead level of ignorance on all topographical and historical questions: to him the Pain d'Abbaye [^[38]] meant nothing further than the staff of life there provided, and he neither knew himself nor could recommend any Brother who knew anything about the glacière. He was a German, and we talked of his native Baiern and the modern glories of his capital; and when his questions elicited a declaration of my profession, he passed up to Saxony, and pinned me with Luther. Finding that I objected to being so pinned, and repudiated something of that which his charge involved, he waived Luther, of whom he knew nothing beyond his name, and came down upon me triumphantly with the word Protestant. I explained to him, of course, that the worthy Elector, and his friends who protested, had not much to do with the Anglican branch of the Church Catholic; and then the old task had to be gone through of assuring the assembled Brothers that we in England have Sacraments, have Orders, have a Trinitarian Creed.

At length, about half-past three, we started for Besançon, paying of course à volonté for food and entertainment, as we did not choose to qualify as paupers. The driver told me on the way that there was another glacière at Vaise, a village three or four kilomètres from Besançon, and at no great distance from the road by which we should approach the town; so, when we reached the crest above Morre, where the road passes the final ridge by means of a tunnel, I paid the carriage off, and walked to the village of Vaise. The public-house knew of the glacière--knew indeed of two,--further still, kept the keys of both. This was good news, though the idea of keys in connection with an ice-cave was rather strange; and I proposed to organise an expedition at once to the glacières. The male half of the auberge declared that he was forbidden to open them to strangers, except by special order from a certain monsieur in Besançon; but the female half, scenting centimes, stated her belief that the monsieur in Besançon could never wish them to turn away a stranger who had come so many kilomètres through the dust to see the ice. She put the proposed disobedience in so persuasive and Christian a form, that I was obliged to take the husband's side,--not that he was in any need of support, for he had been longer married than Adam was, and showed no signs of giving way. It turned out, after all, that though there was no doubt about the existence of the glacières, there was equally no doubt that they were glacières artificielles, being simply ice-houses dug in the side of a hill, and the property of a glacier in Besançon; so that my friend the driver had sent me to a mare's-nest.

The pathway across the hills to Besançon was rather intricate, and by good fortune an old Frenchman appeared, who was returning from his work at a neighbouring church, and served as companion and guide. He had bid farewell to sixty some years before, and, being a builder, had been going up and down a ladder all day, with full and empty hottes, to an extent which outdid the Shanars of missionary meetings; and yet he walked faster than any foreigner of my experience. He talked in due proportion, and told some interesting details of the bombardment of Besançon, which he remembered well. When he learned that I was not German, but English, he told me they did not say Anglais there, but Gaudin,--I was a Gaudin. This he repeated persistently many times, with an air worthy of General Cyrus Choke, and half convinced me that there was something in it, and that I might after all be a Gaudin. It was not till some hours after, that I remembered the indelible impression made by the piety of speech of recent generations of Englishmen upon the French nation at large, and thus was enabled to trace the origin of the name Gaudin. The old man evidently believed that it was the proper thing to call an Englishman by that name; thus reminding me of a story told of a French soldier in the Austrian service during the long early wars with Switzerland. The Austrians called the Swiss, in derision, Kühmelkers--a term more opprobrious than bouviers; and it is said that, after the battle of Frastens--one of the battles of the Suabian war,--a Frenchman threw himself at the feet of some Grisons soldiers, and innocently prayed thus for quarter; 'Très-chers, très-honorables, et très-dignes Kühmelkers! au nom de Dieu, ne me tuez pas!'

The town of Besançon seems to spend its Sunday in fishing, and is apparently well contented with that very limited success which is wont to attend a Frenchman's efforts in this branch of le sport. There is a proverb in the patois of Vaud which says 'Kan on vau dau pesson, sé fo molli;'[^[39]] and on this the Bisuntians act, standing patiently half-way up the thigh in the river, as the Swiss on the Lake of Geneva and other lakes may be seen to do. It is all very well to wade for a good salmon cast, or to spend some hours in a swift-foot[^[40]] Scotch stream for the sake of a lively basket of trout; but to stand in a Sunday coat and hat, and 2-1/2 feet of water, watching a large bung hopelessly unmoved on the surface, is a thing reserved for a Frenchman indulging in a weekly intoxication of Sabbatical sport, under the delirious form of the chasse aux goujons.

Clean as the town within the circuit of the river is, the houses which overhang the water on the other side are picturesque and dirty in the extreme, story rising above story, and balcony above balcony. It does not increase their beauty, and to a fastidious nose it must militate against their eligibility as places of residence, that there is apparently but one drain, an external one, which follows the course of the pillars supporting the various balconies: nevertheless, from the opposite side of the river, and when the wind sets the other way, they are sufficiently attractive. In this quarter is found the finest church, the Madeleine, with a very effective piece of sculpture at the east end. The sculpture is arranged on the bottom and farther side of a sort of cage, which is hung outside the church, but is visible from the inside through a corresponding opening in the east wall. The subject of the sculpture is 'The Sepulchre,' and the ends of the cage or box are composed of rich yellow glass, through which the external light streams into the cave of the Sepulchre; and when the church itself is becoming dark, the effect produced by the light from the evening sky, passing through the deep-toned glass, and softly illuminating the Sepulchre, is indescribably solemn.

When Besançon was supplied by the aqueduct with the waters of Arcier, there was a great abundance of baths, as the remains discovered in digging new foundations show; but in the present state of the town such things are not easily met with. The floating baths on the river are appropriated to the other sex, and the only thing approaching to a male bath was of a nature entirely new to me, being constructed as follows:--There is a water-mill in the town, with a low weir stretching across the river, down which the water rushes with no very great violence. At the foot of this weir a row of sentry-boxes is placed, approached by planks, and in these boxes the adventurer finds his bath.[^[41]]

BATH IN THE DOUBS, AT BESANÇON.

A stout piece of wood-work is fixed horizontally along the face of the weir, and has the effect of throwing the downward water out of its natural direction, and causing it to describe an arch, so that it descends with much force on to the weir at a point below the wood-work. Here two planks are placed, forming a seat and a support for the back, and a little lower still another plank for the feet to rest upon, without which the bather would have a good chance of being washed away. The water boils noisily and violently on all sides and in all directions, coming down upon the subject's shoulders with a heavy thud, which calls to mind the tender years when something softer than a cane was used, and sends him forth like a fresh-boiled lobster. All this, with towels, is not dear at fourpence.

The citadel is the great sight of Besançon, and the polite Colonel-commandant attends at his office at convenient hours to give passes. What it might be to storm the position under the excitement of the sport of war, I cannot say; but certainly it is a most trying affair on a hot Sunday's afternoon, even when all is made smooth, and the gates are opened, by a comprehensive pass. The wall mentioned by Cæsar as a great feature of the place cut the site of the citadel off from the town, and many signs of it were found when the cathedral of S. Stephen was built, the unfortunate church which went down before the exigencies of a siege under Louis XIV. The barrack-master proved to be a most interesting man, knowing many details of Cæsar's life and campaigns which I suspect were not known to that captain himself. He had served in Algeria, and assented to the proposition that more soldiers died there of absinthe than of Arabs, stating his conviction that three-fourths of the whole deaths are caused by that pernicious extract of wormwood, and that he ought himself to have died of it long ago. He pointed out the difference between the massive masonry of the period of the Spanish occupation and the less impressive work of more recent times, and showed the dungeon from which Marshal Bourmont bought his escape, in the time of the first Napoleon.

The floor of one of the little look-out towers is composed of a tombstone, representing a priest in full ecclesiastical dress, and my question as to how it came there elicited the following story:--When Louis XIV. was besieging the citadel, he placed his head-quarters, and a strong battery, on the summit of the Mont Chaudane,[^[42]] which commands the citadel on one side as the Brégille does on the other. Among the besieged was a monk named Schmidt, probably one of the Low-country men to whom the Franche Comté was then a sort of home, as forming part of the dominions of Spain; and this monk was the most active supporter of the defence, against the large party within the walls which was anxious to render the town. He was also an admirable shot; and on one of the last days of the siege, as he stood in the little tower where the tombstone now lies, the King and his staff rode to the front of the plateau on the Mont Chaudane to survey the citadel; whereupon some one pointed out to Schmidt that now he had a fair chance of putting an end at once to the siege and the invasion. Accordingly, he took a musket from a soldier and aimed at the King; but before firing he changed his aim, remarking, that he, a priest, ought not to destroy the life of a man, and so he only killed the horse, giving the Majesty of France a roll in the mud. When the town was taken, the King enquired for the man who killed his horse, and asked the priest whether he could have killed the rider instead, had he wished to do so. 'Certainly,' Schmidt replied, and related the facts of the case. Louis informed him, that had he been a soldier, he should have been decorated for his skill and his impulse of mercy; but, being a priest, he should be hung. The sentence was carried out, and the priest's body was buried in the floor of the tower from which he had spared the King's life. If this be true, it was one of the most unkingly deeds ever done.[^[43]]

This siege took place in the second invasion or conquest of the Franche Comté by Louis XIV., when Besançon held out for nine days against Vauban and the King: on the first occasion it had surrendered to Condé after one day's siege, making the single stipulation that the Holy Shroud should not be removed from the town.[^[44]] The Saincte Suaire was the richest ecclesiastical treasure of the Bisuntians, being one of the two most genuine of the many Suaires, the other being that of Turin, which was supported by Papal Infallibility. Both were brought from the Crusades; and the one was presented to Besançon in 1206, the other to Turin in 1353. Bede tells a story of the proving of a Shroud by fire in the eighth century, by one of the caliphs; and as its dimensions were 8 feet by 4, like that of Besançon, while the Shroud of Turin measured 12 feet by 3, the people of Besançon claimed that theirs was the one spoken of by Bede.

The Cathedral of Besançon is no longer S. Stephen, since the destruction of that church by Louis XIV. The small Church of the Citadel is now dedicated to that saint, an inscription on the wall stating that it takes the place of the larger church, ex urbis obsidio anno 1674 lapsae, and offering an indulgence of 100 days for every visit paid to it, with the sensible proviso una duntaxat vice per diem. Soldiers not being generally made of the confessing sex, or of confessing material, there is only one confessional provided for the 6,000 souls which the citadel can accommodate.

The Cavalry Barracks are in the lower part of the town, and near them is a large building with evident traces of ecclesiastical architecture on the outside. It is, in fact, a very fine church converted into stables, retaining its interior features in excellent preservation. Under the corn-bin lies a lady who had two husbands and fifteen children, Antigone in parentes, Porcia in conjuges, Sempronia in liberos; while a few yards further east, less agreeably placed, is an ecclesiastic of the Gorrevod family, who reckoned Prince and Bishop and Baron among his titles. The nave of this Church of S. Michael accommodates thirty horses, and the north aisle thirteen; the south is considered more select, and is boarded off for the decani, in the shape of officers' chargers. The north side of the chancel gives room for six horses, and the south side for a row of saddle-blocks. It had been an oversight on the part of the original architect of the church that no place was prepared for the daily hay; a fault which the military restorers have remedied by improvising a lady-chapel, where the hay for the day is placed in the morning. With Spelman in my mind, I asked if the stables were not unhealthy; but the soldiers said they were the healthiest in the town.[^[45]]

The Glacière of Vaise had proved, as has been seen, to be a mare's-nest; and yet, after all, it produced a foal; for while I was endeavouring to overcome the evening heat of Besançon in a spécialité for ice, I found that the owner of the establishment was also the owner of the two glacières of Vaise; and in the course of the conversation which followed, he told me of the existence of a natural glacière near the village of Arc-sous-Cicon, twenty kilomètres from Pontarlier, which he had himself seen. As I had arranged to meet my sisters at Neufchâtel, in two days' time, for the purpose of visiting a glacière in the Val de Travers, this piece of information came very opportunely, and I determined to attempt both glacières with them.

Some of the trains from Besançon stop for an hour at Dôle in passing towards Switzerland by way of Pontarlier, and anyone who is interested in the Burgundian and Spanish wars of France should take this opportunity of seeing what may be seen of the town of Dôle and its massive church-tower. The sieges of Dôle made it very famous in the later middle ages, more especially the long siege under Charles d'Amboise, at the crisis of which that general recommended his soldiers to leave a few of the people for seed,[^[46]] and the old sobriquet la Joyeuse was punningly changed to la Dolente. It has had other claims upon fame; for if Besançon possessed one of the two most authentic Holy Shrouds, Dôle was the resting-place of one of the undoubted miraculous Hosts, which had withstood the flames in the Abbey of Faverney. It was for the reception of this Host that the advocates of the Brotherhood of Monseigneur Saint Yves built the Sainte Chapelle at Dôle.[^[47]]

CHAPTER VII.

THE GLACIÈRE OF MONTHÉZY, IN THE VAL DE TRAVERS.

I rejoined my sisters at Neufchâtel on the 5th of July, and proceeded thence with them by the line which passes through the Val de Travers. One of them had been at Fleurier, in 1860, on the day of the opening of this line, and she added an interest to the various tunnels, by telling us that a Swiss gentleman of her acquaintance, who had taken a place in one of the open carriages of the first train, found, on reaching the daylight after one of the tunnels, that his neighbour had been killed by a small stone which had fallen on to his head. Where the stone came from, no one could say, nor yet when it fell, for the unfortunate man had made no sign or movement of any kind.

Every one must be delighted with the wonders of the line of rail, and the beauties through which the engineer has cut his way. In valleys on a less magnificent scale, cuttings and embankments on the face of the hill are sad eyesores, as in railway-ruined Killiecrankie; but here Nature's works are so very grand, that the works of man are not offensively prominent, being overawed by the very facts over which they have triumphed. When we reached the more even part of the valley, where the Reuse no longer roars and rushes far below, but winds quietly through the soft grass on a level with the rail, the whole grouping was so exceedingly charming, and the river itself so suggestive of lusty trout, and the village of Noiraigue[^[48]] looked so tempting as it nestled in a sheltered nook among the headlong precipices, that I registered in a safe mental pigeon-hole a week at the auberge there with a fishing-rod, and excursions to the commanding summit in which the Creux de Vent is found. The engine-driver knew that he was in a region of beauties, and, when he whistled to warn his passengers that the train was about to move on, he remained stationary until the long-resounding echoes died out, floating lingeringly up the valley to neighbouring France.

We had no definite idea as to the locale of the glacière we were now bent upon attacking. M. Thury's list gave the following information:--'Glacière de Motiers, Canton de Neufchâtel, entre les vallées de Travers et de la Brévine, près du sentier de la Brévine;' and this I had rendered somewhat more precise by a cross-examination of the guard of the train on my way to Besançon. He had not heard of the glacière, but from what I told him he was inclined to think that Couvet would be the best station for our purpose, especially as the 'Ecu' at that place was, in his eyes, a commendable hostelry. Some one in Geneva, also, had believed that Couvet was as likely as anything else in the valley; so at Couvet we descended.[^[49]]

This is a very clean and cheerful village, devoted to the lucrative manufacture of absinthe, and producing inhabitants who look like gentlemen and ladies, and promenade the ways in bonnets and hats, after a most un-Swiss-like fashion. They carefully restrict themselves to the making of the poisonous product of their village, and have nothing to do with the consumption thereof:[^[50]] hence nature has a fair chance with them, and they are a healthy and energetic race. The beauties of the surrounding mountains, with their fitful alternations of pasture and wood, and grey face of rock, are not marred by the outward appearance, at least, of that which Bishop Heber lamented in a country where 'every prospect pleases.' An old lady is commemorated in the annals of Couvet as an example of the healthiness of the situation, who saw seven generations of her family, having known her great-grandfather in her early years, and living to nurse great-grandchildren in her old age. The landlord of the inn informed us, with much pride, that Couvet was the birthplace of the man who invented a clock for telling the time at sea; by which, no doubt, he meant the chronometer, invented by M. Berthoud. At Motiers, the next village, Rousseau wrote his Lettres de la Montagne, and thence it was that he fled from popular violence to the island on the Lake of Bienne.

The 'Ecu' promised us dinner in half an hour, and we strolled about in the garden of that unsophisticated hotel for an hour and a half, reconciled to the delay by the beauty of the neighbouring hills, the winding of the valley giving all the effect of a mountain-locked plain, with barriers decked with firs. It will readily be conceived, however, that three practical English people could not be satisfied to feed on beauty alone for any very great length of time, and we caught the landlady and became peremptory. She explained that dinner was quite ready, but she had intended to give us the pleasure of an agreeable society, consisting of sundry Swiss who were due in another half-hour or so: she yielded, nevertheless, to our representations, and promised to serve the meal at once. We were speedily summoned to the salle-à-manger, and entered a low smoke-stained wooden chamber, with no floor to speak of, and with huge beams supporting the roof, dangerous for tall heads. The date on the door was 1690, and the chamber fully looked its age. There was a long table of the prevailing hue, with a similar bench; and on the table three large basins, presumably containing soup, were ranged, each covered with its plate, and accompanied by a ricketty spoon of yellow metal and a hunch of black bread. A., who was hungry enough and experienced enough to have known better, began promptly a most pathetic 'Why surely!' but the landlady stopped her by opening a side door, and displaying a comfortable room in which a well-appointed table awaited us:--she had taken us through the kitchen rather than through the salon, in which were peasants smoking. We were somewhat disconcerted when we heard that the unwashed-looking place was the kitchen; but the landlady had made up for it by scrubbing her husband, who waited upon us, to a high pitch of presentability, and further experience showed that the 'Ecu' is to be highly commended for the excellence and abundance and cheapness of its foods.

There are many natural curiosities in and near the Val de Travers, which well repay the labour that must be expended upon them. The Temple des Fées, on the western side of the Valley of Verrières, used to be called the most beautiful grotto in Switzerland; and the great Cavern of La Baume, near Motiers, is said to be exceedingly wonderful. We were shown the entrance to a line of caverns in the hills above Couvet, and were informed that it was possible to pierce completely through the range, and pass out at the other side within sight of Yverdun. One of the caverns in this valley had been explored by some of A. and M.'s Swiss friends, and the account of what they had gone through was by no means inviting, seeing that the prevailing material was damp clay of a solid character, arranged in steep slopes, up which progression must be made by inserting the fingers and toes as far as might be into the clay; and, of course, when the handful of unpleasant mud came away, the result was the reverse of progression. To anyone who has only known the rope up the pure white side of some snow mountain, the idea of being roped for the purpose of grappling with underground banks of adhesive mud and clay must be horrible in the extreme. Another interesting natural phenomenon is presented by the source of the Reuse, that river gushing out from the rock in considerable volume, probably formed by the drainage of the Lake of Etallières, in the distant valley of La Brévine; while the Longe-aigue, on the contrary, is lost in a gulf of such horror that the people call the mill which stands on its edge the Moulin d'enfer.

As usual, we were assured that many of these remarkable sights were far better worth a visit than the glacière, of which no one seemed to know anything. A guide was at length secured for the next morning, who had made his way to the cave once in the winter-time and had been unable to enter it, and we settled down quietly to an evening of perfect rest. The windows of the bedrooms being guiltless of blinds and curtains, the effect of waking, in the early morning, to find them blocked up, as it were, by the green slopes of pasture and the dark bands of fir-woods which clothed the limiting hills, seemed almost magical, the foreground being occupied solely by the graceful curve of the dome of the church-tower, glittering with intercepted rays, and forming a bright omen for the day thus ushered in.

In due time the promised guide appeared, a sickly boy of unprepossessing appearance, and of patois to correspond. I was at first tempted to propose that we should attack him stereoscopically, A. administering French and I simultaneous German, in the hope that the combination might convey some meaning to him; but, after a time, we succeeded with French alone. Perhaps Latin would have made a more likely mélange than German, and to give it him in three dimensions would not have been a bad plan. The route for the glacière runs straight up the face of the hill along which the railway has been constructed; and as we passed through woods of beech and fir, with fresh green glades rolling down below our feet, or emerged from the woods to cross large undulating expanses of meadow-land, we were almost inclined to believe that we had never done so lovely a walk. The scenery through which we passed was thoroughly that of the lower districts of the Alps, with nothing Jurane in its character, and the elevation finally achieved was not very great: indeed, at a short distance from the glacière, we passed a collection of very neat châlets, with gardens and garden-flowers, one of the châlets rejoicing in countless beehives, with three or four 'ekes' apiece. Up to the time of reaching this little village, which seemed to be called Sagnette, our path had been that which leads to La Brévine, the highest valley in the canton; but now we turned off abruptly up the steeper face on the left hand, and in a very few minutes came upon a dry wilderness of rock and grass, which we at once recognised as 'glacière country;' and when I told our guide that we must be near the place, he replied by pointing to the trees round the mouth of the pit.

Shortly after we first left Couvet, a gaunt elderly female, with a one-bullock char, had joined our party, and tried to bully us into giving up the cave and going instead to a neighbouring summit, whence she promised us a view of unrivalled extent and beauty. She told us that there was nothing to be seen in the glacière, and that it was a place where people lost their lives. The guide said that was nonsense; but she reduced him to silence by quoting a case in point. She said, too, that if a man slipped and fell, there was nothing to prevent him from going helplessly down a run of ice into a subterranean watercourse, which would carry him for two or three leagues underground; and on this head our boy had no counter-statement to make. She asserted that without ladders it was utterly impossible to make the descent to the commencement of the glacière; and she vowed there was no ladder now, nor had been for some time. Here the boy came in, stating that the cave belonged to a mademoiselle of Neufchâtel, who had a summer cottage at no great distance, and loved to be supplied with ice during her residence in the country, for which purpose she kept a sound ladder on the spot, and had it removed in the winter that it might not be destroyed. There was a circumstantial air about this statement which for the moment got the better of the old woman; but she speedily recovered herself, and repeated positively that there was no ladder of any description, adding, somewhat inconsequently, that it was such a bad one, no Christian could use it with safety. The boy retorted, that it was all very well for her to run the glacière down, as she lived near it, but for the world from a distance it was a most wonderful sight; and, as for the ladder, he happened to know that it was at this time in excellent preservation. The event proved that in saying this he drew entirely upon his imagination. It is, perhaps, only fair to suppose that they don't mean anything by it, and it may be mere ignorance on their part; but the simple fact is, that some of those Swiss rustics tell the most barefaced lies conceivable,--unblushing is an epithet that cannot be safely applied without previous soap and water,--and tell them in a plodding systematic manner which takes in all but the experienced and wary traveller. I have myself learned to suspend my judgment regarding the most simple thing in nature, until I have other grounds for forming an opinion than the solemn asseverations of the most stolid and respectable Swiss, if it so be that money depends upon his report.[^[51]]

As in the case of two of the glacières already described, the entrance is by a deep pit, which has the appearance of having been at one time two pits, one less deep than the other; and the barrier between the two having been removed by some natural process, a passage is found down the steep side of the shallower pit, which lands the adventurer on a small sloping shelf, 21 feet sheer above the surface of the snow in the deeper pit, the sides of the latter rising up perpendicularly all round. It is for this last 21 feet that some sort of ladder is absolutely necessary. Our guide flung himself down in the sun at the outer edge of the pit, and informed us that as it was cold and dangerous down below, he intended to go no farther: he had engaged, he said, to guide us to the glacière, and he felt in no way bound to go into it. He was not good for much, so I was not sorry to hear of his determination; and when my sisters saw the sort of place they had to try to scramble down, they appeared to be very glad that only I was to be with them.

Leaving them to make such arrangements with regard to dress as might seem necessary to them, I proceeded to pioneer the way down the first part of the descent. This was extremely unpleasant, for the rocks were steep and very moist, with treacherous little collections of disintegrated material on every small ledge where the foot might otherwise have found a hold. These had to be cleared away before it could be safe for them to descend, and in other places the broken rock had to be picked out to form foot-holes; while, lower down, where the final shelf was reached, the abrupt slope of mud which ended in the sheer fall required considerable reduction, being far too beguiling in its original form. Here there was also a buttress of damp earth to be got round, and it was necessary to cut out deep holes for the hands and feet before even a man could venture upon the attempt with any comfort. The buttress was not, however, without its advantage, for on it, overhanging the snow of the lower pit, was a beautiful clump of cowslips (Primula elatior, Fr. Primevère inodore), which was at once secured as a trophy. The length of the irregular descent to this point was between 70 and 80 feet. On rounding the buttress, the upper end of the ladder presented itself, and now the question, between the boy and the old woman was to be decided. I worked down to the edge of the shelf, and looked over into the pit, and, alas! the state of the remaining parts of the ladder was hopeless, owing partly to the decay of the sidepieces, and partly to the general absence of steps--a somewhat embarrassing feature under the circumstances. A further investigation showed that for the 21 feet of ladder there were only seven steps, and these seven were not arranged as conveniently as they might have been, for two occurred at the very top, and the other five in a group at the bottom. A branchless fir-tree had at some time fallen into the pit, and now lay in partial contact with the ruined ladder; and there were on the trunk various little knobs, which might possibly be of some use as a supplement to the rare steps of the ladder. The snow at the bottom of the pit was surrounded on all sides by perpendicular rock, and on the side opposite to the ladder I saw an arch at the foot of the rock, apparently 2 or 3 feet high, leading from the snow into darkness; and that, of course, was the entrance to the glacière. I succeeded in getting down the ladder, by help of the supplement, and looked down into the dark hole to see that it was practicable, and then returned to report progress in the upper regions. We had brought no alpenstocks to Couvet, so we sent the guide off into the woods, where we had heard the sound of an axe, to get three stout sticks from the woodmen; but he returned with such wretched, crooked little things, that A. went off herself to forage, and, having found an impromptu cattle-fence, came back with weapons resembling bulbous hedge-stakes, which she skinned and generally modified with a powerful clasp-knife, her constant companion. She then cut up the crooked sticks into bâtons for a contemplated repair of the ladder, while M. and I investigated the country near the pit. We found two other pits, which afterwards proved to communicate with the glacière. We could approach sufficiently near to one of these to see down to the bottom, where there was a considerable collection of snow: this pit was completely sheltered from the sun by trees, and was 66 feet deep and 4 or 5 feet in diameter. The other was of larger size, but its edge was so treacherous that we did not venture so near as to see what it contained: its depth was about 70 feet, and the stone and a foot or two of the string came up wet. The sides of the main pit, by which we were to enter the glacière, were, as has been said, very sheer, and on one side we could approach sufficiently near the edge to drop a plummet down to the snow: the height of this face of rock was 59 feet, measuring down to the snow, and the level of the ice was eventually found to be about 4 feet lower. Although it was now not very far from noon, the sun had not yet reached the snow, owing partly to the depth of the pit as compared with its diameter, and partly to the trees which grew on several sides close to the edge. One or two trees of considerable size grew out of the face of rock.

We were now cool enough to attempt the glacière, and I commenced the descent with A. The precautions already taken made the way tolerably possible down to the buttress of earth and the shelving ledge, and so far the warm sun had accompanied us; but beyond the ledge there was nothing but the broken ladder, and deep shade, and a cold damp atmosphere, which made the idea, and still more the feel, of snow very much the reverse of pleasant. A. was not a coward on such occasions, and she had sufficient confidence in her guide; but it is rather trying for a lady to make the first step off a slippery slope of mud, on to an apology for a ladder which only stands up a few inches above the lower edge of the slope, and so affords no support for the hand: nor, after all, can bravery and trust quite make up for the want of steps. We were a very long time in accomplishing the descent, for her feet were always out of her sight, owing to the shape which female dress assumes when its wearer goes down a ladder with her face to the front, especially when the ladder has suffered from ubiquitous compound fracture, and the ragged edges catch the unaccustomed petticoats. It was quite as well the feet were out of sight, for some of the supports to which they were guided were not such as would have commended themselves to her, had she been able to see them. At length, owing in great measure to the opportune assistance of two of the batons we had brought down with us for repairs, thanks also to the trunk of the fir-tree, we reached the snow; and poor A. was planted there, breaking through the top crust as a commencement of her acquaintance with it, till such time as I could bring M. down to join her.

VERTICAL SECTION OF THE GLACIÈRE OF MONTHÉZY, IN THE VAL DE TRAVERS.

The experience acquired in the course of A.'s descent led us to call to M. that she must get rid of that portion of her attire which gives a shape to modern dress; for the obstinacy and power of mal-à-propos obstructiveness of this garment had wonderfully complicated our difficulties. She objected that the guide was there; but we assured her that he was asleep, or if he wasn't it made no matter; so when I reached the top, she emerged shapeless from a temporary hiding-place, clutching her long hedge-stake, and feeling, she said--and certainly looking--a good deal like a gorilla. The most baffling part of the trouble having been thus got over, we soon joined A., blue already, and shivering on the snow. The sun now reached very nearly to the bottom of the pit, and I went up once more for thermometers and other things, leaving a measure with my sisters, and begging them to amuse themselves by taking the dimensions of the snow: on my return, however, to the top of the ladder, I found them combining over a little bottle, and they informed me plaintively that they had been taking medicinal brandy and snow instead of measurements,--a very necessary precaution, for anyone to whom brandy is not a greater nuisance than utter cold. We found the dimensions of the bottom of the pit, i.e. of the field of snow on which we stood, to be 31-1/2 feet by 21; but we were unable to form any idea of the depth of the snow, beyond the fact that 'up to the ancle' was its prevailing condition. The boy told us, when we rejoined him, that when he and others had attempted to get ice for the landlord, when it was ordered for him in a serious illness the winter before, they had found the pit filled to the top with snow.

As we stood at the mouth of the low entrance, making final preparations for a plunge into the darkness, I perceived a strong cold current blowing out from the cave--sufficiently strong and cold to render knickerbocker stockings a very unavailing protection. While engaged in the discovery that this style of dress is not without its drawbacks, I found, to my surprise, that the direction of the current suddenly changed, and the cold blast which had before blown out of the cave, now blew almost as strongly in. The arch of entrance was so low, that the top was about on a level with my waist; so that our faces and the upper parts of our bodies were not exposed to the current, and the strangeness of the effect was thus considerably increased.

GROUND PLAN OF THE GLACIÈRE OF MONTHÉZY. Note: The candle stood at this point.

As a matter of curiosity, we lighted a bougie, and placed it on the edge of the snow, at the top of the slope of 3 or 4 feet which led down the surface of the ice, and then stood to watch the effect of the current on the flame. The experiment proved that the currents alternated, and, as I fancied, regularly; and in order to determine, if possible, the law of this alternation, I observed with my watch the exact duration of each current. For twenty-two seconds the flame of the bougie was blown away from the entrance, so strongly as to assume a horizontal position, and almost to leave the wick: then the current ceased, and the flame rose with a stately air to a vertical position, moving down again steadily till it became once more horizontal, but now pointing in towards the cave. This change occupied in all four seconds; and the current inwards lasted--like the outward current--twenty-two seconds, and then the whole phenomenon was repeated. The currents kept such good time, that when I stood beyond their reach, and turned my back, I was enabled to announce each change with perfect precision. On one occasion, the flame performed its semicircle in a horizontal instead of a vertical plane, moving round the wick in the shape of a pea-flower. The day was very still, so that no external winds could have anything to do with this singular alternation; and, indeed, the pit was so completely sheltered by its shape, that a storm might have raged outside without producing any perceptible effect below. It would be difficult to explain the regularity of these opposite currents, but it is not so difficult to see that some such oscillation might be expected. It will be better, however, to defer any suggestions on this point till the glacière has been more fully described.

We passed down at length through the low archway, and stood on the floor of ice. As our eyes became accustomed to the darkness, we saw that an indistinct light streamed into the cave from some low point at a considerable distance, apparently on a level with the floor; and this we afterwards found to be the bottom of the larger of the two pits we had already fathomed, the pit A of the diagram; and we eventually discovered a similar but much smaller communication with the bottom of the pit B. In each of these pits there was a considerable pyramid of snow, whose base was on a level with the floor of the glacière: the connecting archway in the case of the pit A was 3 or 4 feet high, allowing us to pass into the pit and round the pyramid with perfect ease, while that leading to the pit B was less than a foot high, so that no passage could be forced.

As we stood on the ice at the entrance and peered into the comparative darkness, we saw by degrees that the glacière consisted of a continuous sea of smooth ice, sloping down very gently towards the right hand. The rock which forms the roof of the cave seemed to be almost as even as the floor, and was from 4 to 5 feet high in the neighbourhood in which we now found ourselves, gradually approaching the floor towards the bottom of the pit B, where it became about a foot high, and rising slightly in that part of the cave where the floor fell, so as to give 9 or 10 feet as the height there. The ice had all the appearance of great depth; but there were no means of forming a trustworthy opinion on this point, beyond the fact that I succeeded in lowering a stone to a considerable depth, in the small crevice which existed between the wall and the block of ice which formed the floor. The greatest length of the cave we found to be 112 ft. 7 in., and its breadth 94 ft., the general shape of the field of ice, which filled it to its utmost edges, being elliptical. The surface was unpleasantly wet, chiefly in the line of the currents, which were now seen to pass backwards and forwards between the pits A and C. In the neighbourhood of the pit B the water stood in a very thin sheet on the ice, which there was level, and rendered the style of locomotion necessitated by the near approach of the roof extremely disagreeable, as I was obliged to lie on my face, and push myself along the wet and slippery ice, to explore that corner of the cave, being at length stopped by want of sufficient height for even that method of progression.

The circle marked D represents a column from the roof, at the foot of which we found a small grotto in the ice, which I entered to a depth of 6 feet, the surface of the field of ice showing a very gracefully rounded fall at the edges of the grotto. At the point E there was a beautiful collection of fretted columns, white and hard as porcelain, arranged in a semicircle, with the diameter facing the cave, measuring 22 ft. 9 in. along this face. On the farther side of these columns there were signs of a considerable fall in the ice; and by making use of the roots of small stalagmitic columns of that material, which grew on the slope of ice, I got down into a little wilderness of spires and flutings, and found a small cave penetrating a short way under the solid ice-floor. G marks the place of a free stalagmite of ice, formed under a fissure in the roof; and each F represents a column from the roof, or from a lateral fissure in the wall.

The most striking features of this cave were the three domes, marked H in the ground-plan, in which they ought strictly not to appear, as being confined to the roof: one of them is shown also in the vertical section of the cave. They occur where the roof is from 3 to 4 feet above the floor. It will be understood, that the bent attitude in which we were obliged to investigate these parts of the cave was exceedingly fatiguing, and we hailed with delight a sudden circular opening in the roof which enabled us to stand upright. This delight was immensely increased when our candles showed us that the walls of this vertical opening were profusely decorated with the most lovely forms of ice. The first that we came under passed up out of sight; and in this, two solid cascades of ice hung down, high overhead, apparently broken off short, or at any rate ending very abruptly: the others did not pass so far into the roof, and formed domes of very regular shape. In all three, the details of the ice-decoration were most lovely, and the effect produced by the whole situation was very curious; for we stood with our legs exposed to the alternating cold currents, the remaining part of our bodies being imbedded as it were in the roof; while the candles in our hands brought out the crystal ornaments of the sides, flashing fitfully all round us and overhead, when one or other of us moved a light, as if we had been surrounded by diamonds of every possible size and setting. One of the domes was so small, that we were obliged to stand up by turn to examine its beauties; but in the others we all stood together. On every side were branching clusters of ice in the form of club-mosses, with here and there varicose veins of clear ice, and pinnacles of the prismatic structure, with limpid crockets and finials. The pipes of ice which formed a network on the walls were in some cases so exquisitely clear, that we could not be sure of their existence without touching them; and in other cases a sheet 4 or 6 inches thick was found to be no obstruction to our view of the rock on which it was formed. In one of the domes we had only one candle, and the bearer of this after a time contrived to let it fall, leaving us standing with our heads in perfect darkness; while the indistinct light which strayed about our feet showed faintly a circle of icicles, hanging from the lower part of the dome, the fringe, as it were, of our rocky petticoats.

In one of the lower parts of the cave, where darkness prevailed, and locomotion was only possible on the lowest reptile principles, M. announced that she could see clear through the ice-floor, as if there were nothing between her and the rock below. I ventured to doubt this, for there was an air of immense thickness about the whole ice; and as soon as A. and I had succeeded in grovelling across the intervening space, and converged upon her, we found that the appearance she had observed was due to a most perfect reflection of the roof, as shown by the candles we carried, which may give some idea of the character of the ice. We did not care to study this effect for any very prolonged time, inasmuch as we were obliged meanwhile to stow away the length of our legs on a part of the ice which was thinly covered with water,--one result of its proximity to the arch communicating with the smallest pit.

It has been said that the whole ice-floor sloped slightly towards one side of the cave, the slope becoming rather more steep near the edge.[^[52]] Clearly, ever so slight a slope would be sufficiently embarrassing, when the surface was so perfectly smooth and slippery; and this added much to the difficulty of walking in a bent attitude. On coming out of one of the domes, I tried progression on all-fours--threes, rather, for the candle occupied one hand,--and I cannot recommend that method, owing to the impossibility of putting on the break. The pace ultimately acquired is greater than is pleasant, and the roof is too near the floor to allow of any successful attempt to bring things to an end by the reassumption of a biped character.

We placed a thermometer in the line of greatest current, and another in a still part of the cave. The memorandum is lost of their register--if, indeed, we ever made one, for we were more concerned with the beauties than the temperature was surprisingly high in the line of current, as compared with the ordinary temperature of ice-caves.

When we came to compare backs, after leaving the cave, we mutually found that they were in a very disreputable condition. The damp and ragged roof with which they had been so frequently in contact had produced a marked effect upon them, and I eventually paid a tailor in Geneva three francs for restoring my coat to decency. M. took great credit to herself for having been more careful of her back than the others, and declined to be laughed at for forgetting that she was only about half as high as they, to begin with. A. still remembers the green-grey stains, as the most obstinate she ever had to deal with, especially as her three-days' knapsack contained no change for that outer part of her dress.

The 'Ecu' gave us a charming dinner on our return; then a moderate bill, and an affectionate farewell; and we succeeded in catching the early evening train for Pontarlier.[^[53]]

CHAPTER VIII.

THE GLACIÈRE AND NEIGIÈRE OF ARC-SOUS-CICON.

The beauties of the Val de Travers end only with the valley itself, at the head of which a long tunnel ushers the traveller into a tamer country,--a preparation, as it were, for France. After the border is passed, the scenery begins to improve again, and the effect of the two castles of Joux, the new and the old, crowning the heights on either side of the narrow gorge through which the railway runs, is very fine. The guide-books inform us that the Château of Joux was the place of imprisonment of the unfortunate Toussaint L'Ouverture, and that there he died of neglect and cold; and it was in the same strong fortress that Mirabeau was confined by his father's desire. The old castle, however, is more interesting from its connection with the history of Charles the Bold, who retired to La Rivière after the battle of Morat, and spent here those sad solitary weeks of which Philip de Comines tells with so many moral reflections; weeks of bodily and mental distress, which left him a mere wreck, and led to his wild want of generalship and his miserable death at Nancy. He had melted down the church-bells in this part of Burgundy and Vaud, to make cannon for the final effort which failed so fatally at Morat; and the old chroniclers relate--without any allusion to the sacrilege--that the artillery was wretchedly served on that cruel[^[54]] day. It is some comfort to Englishmen to know that their ancestors under the Duke of Somerset displayed a marvellous courage on the occasion.

We reached Pontarlier in time for a stroll through the quiet town; but we searched in vain for the tempting convents and gates, which were marked on my copy of an old plan of the place, dedicated to the Prince d'Arenberg, in the well-known times when he governed the Franche Comté. The convents had become for the most part breweries, and the gates had been improved away. Our enquiries respecting the place of our destination were fortunately more successful. The idea of a glacière was new to the world of Pontarlier; but the landlord of the Hôtel National had heard of Arc-sous-Cicon, and had no doubt that we could find a carriage of some sort to take us there. His own horses were all engaged in haymaking, but his neighbours' horses might be less busy, and accordingly he took us first to call upon M. Paget, a friend who added to his income by keeping a horse and voiture for hire. The Pagets in general had gone to bed, and the door was fastened; but our guide seemed to know the ways of the house, and we found Madame in the stables, and arranged with her for a carriage at seven o'clock the next morning.

At the time appointed, M. Paget did not come, and I was obliged to go and look him up. He proved to me that it was all right, somehow, and evidently understood that his convenience, not ours, was the thing to be consulted. The hotel is in a narrow street, and, apparently on that account, a stray passer-by was caught, and pressed into M. Paget's service to help to turn the carriage,--a feat accomplished by a bodily lifting of the hinder part, with its wheels. After-experience showed that the narrowness of the street had nothing to with it, and we discovered that the necessity for the manoeuvre was due to a chronic affection of some portion of the voiture; so that whenever in the course of the day it became necessary for us to turn round, M. Paget was constrained to call in foreign help.

The country through which we passed was uninteresting in the extreme, although we had been told by the landlord that our drive would introduce us to a succession of natural beauties such as few countries in the world could show. The line of hills, at the foot of which we expected our route to lie, looked exceedingly tempting as seen from Pontarlier; but, to our disappointment, we left the hills and struck across the plain. About ten or eleven kilomètres from Pontarlier, however, the character of the country changed suddenly, and we found the landlord's promise in some part fulfilled. Rich meadow-slopes were broken by solitary trees arranged in Nature's happiest style, and grey precipices of Jurane grimness and perpendicularity encroached upon the woods and grass. We were coming near the source of the Loue, M. Paget said, which it would be necessary for us to visit. He told us that we must leave the carriage at an auberge on the roadside, and walk to the neighbouring village of Ouhans, which was inaccessible for voitures, and thence we should easily find our way to the source. The distance, he declared, was twenty minutes. The woman at the auberge strongly recommended the source, but did her best to dissuade us from the glacières, of which she said there were two. She had visited them herself, and told her husband, who had guided her, that there was nothing to see. That, we thought, proved nothing against the glacières, and her dulness of appreciation we were willing to accept without further proof than her personal appearance. Besides, to go to the source, and not to Arc, would mean dining with her; so that she was not an impartial adviser.

M. Paget was a short square man, of very few words, and his one object in life seemed to be to save his black horse as much as possible; a very creditable object in itself, so long as he did not go too far in his endeavours to accomplish it. On the present occasion he certainly did go too far. The road was quite as good as that which we had left, and there was no reason in the world why the carriage should not have taken us to the village. Worse still, we discovered eventually that the 'twenty minutes' meant twenty minutes from the village to the source, and represented really something like half the time necessary for that part of the march, while there was a hot and dusty walk of half an hour before we reached the village. As he accompanied us in person, we had the satisfaction of frequently telling him our mind with insular frankness. He pretended to be much distressed, but assured us each time we returned to the charge--about every quarter of an hour--that we were close to the desired spot. From the village to the source, the way led us through such pleasant scenery and such acceptable strawberries, that we only kept up our periodical remonstrances on principle, and, after we had wound rapidly down through a grand defile, and turned a sudden angle of the rock, the first sight of that which we had come to see amply repaid us all the trouble we had gone through. The source of the Orbe is sufficiently striking, but the Loue is by far more grand at the moment of its birth. The former is a bright fairy-like stream, gushing out of a small cavern at the foot of a lofty precipice clothed with clinging trees; but the Loue flows out from the bottom of an amphitheatrical rock much more lofty and unbroken. The stream itself is broader and deeper, and glides with an infinitely more majestic calmness from a vast archway in the rock, into the recesses of which the eye can penetrate to the point where the roof closes in upon the water, and so cuts off all further view. The calmness of the flow may be in part attributed to a weir, which has been built across the stream at the mouth of the cave, for the purpose of driving a portion of the water into a channel which conveys it to various mill-wheels; for, at a very short distance below the weir, the natural stream makes a fall of 17 feet, so that, if left to itself, it might probably rush out more impetuously from its mysterious cavern. The weir is a single timber, below the surface, fixed obliquely across the stream on a shelving bank of masonry, and the farther end meets the wall of rock inside the cave. Near it we saw some glorious hart's-tongue ferns, which excited our desires, and I took off boots and stockings, and endeavoured to make my way along the weir; but the face of the masonry was so very slippery, and the nails in the timber so unpleasant for bare feet, and the stream was so unexpectedly strong, that I called to mind the proverbial definition of the better part of valour, and came back without having achieved the ferns. The biting coldness of the water, and the boiling of the fall close below the weir, did not add to my confidence in making the attempt, but I should think that in a more favourable state of the water the cave might be very well explored by two men going alone. The day penetrated so completely into the farthest corners, that when I got half-way along the weir, I could detect the oily look on the surface where it first saw the light, which showed where the water was quietly streaming up from its unknown sources. The people in the neighbourhood were unable to suggest any lake or lakes of which this river might be the subterranean drainage. It is liable to sudden and violent overflows, which seldom last more than twenty-four hours; and from the destruction of property caused by these outbursts, the name of La Loue, sc. La Louve, has been given to it. The rocky valley through which the river runs, after leaving its underground channel, is exceedingly fine, and we wandered along the precipices on one side, enjoying the varying scenes so much that we could scarcely bring ourselves to turn; each bend of the fretting river showing a narrow gorge in the rock, with a black rapid, and a foaming fall. It is said that although the mills on the Doubs are sometimes stopped from want of water, those which derive their motive power from this strange and impressive cavern have never known the supply to fail.

Before we started for our ramble among the woods and precipices which overhang the farther course of the Loue, we had sent off M. Paget to the auberge, with strict orders that he should at once get out the black horse, and bring the carriage to meet us at Ouhans, as one of us was not in so good order for walking as usual, and the day was fast slipping away. Of course we saw nothing of him when we reached Ouhans; and as it was not prudent to wait for his arrival there, which might never take place, we walked through the broiling sun in the direction of the auberge, and at last saw him coming, pretending to whip his horse as if he were in earnest about the pace. We somewhat sullenly assisted him to turn the old carriage round, and then bade him drive as hard as he could to Arc-sous-Cicon, still a long way off. This he said he would do if he knew which was the way; but since he was last there, as a much younger man, there had been a general change in the matter of roads, and how the new ones lay he did not know. This was not cheerful intelligence, especially as we had set our hearts upon getting back to Pontarlier in time for the evening train, which would give us a night at the charming Bellevue at Neufchâtel, instead of the poisonous coffee and the trying odours of the National: the old man's instinct, however, led him right, and we reached Arc at half-past twelve. One obstacle to our journey on the new road promised at first to be insurmountable, being an immense sapin, the largest I have seen felled, which lay on a combination of wood-chairs straight across the road. It had been brought down a narrow side-road through a wheat-field, and one end occupied this road, while the other was jammed against the wall on the opposite side of the main road; and half-a-dozen men, with as many draught oxen, were mainly endeavouring to turn it in the right direction. M. Paget knew how much was required to turn his own carriage, and he calculated that the road would not be free for two or three hours, which involved a rest for his black horse, a pipe for himself, and, possibly, a short sleep. The oxen were lazy, and their hides impervious; the whips were cracked in vain, and in vain were brought more directly to bear upon the senses of the recusants; the men howled, and rattled the chains, and re-arranged the clumsy head-gear, but all to no purpose. The man who did most of the howling was a black Burgundian dwarf, in a long blouse and moustaches; and he did it in so frightful a patois, that the oxen were right in their refusal to understand. We represented to M. Paget that it would be possible to make our way through the wheat; but he declared himself perfectly happy where he was, and declined to take any steps in the matter; whereupon I assumed the command of the expedition, and led the horse through the corn, thus turning the flank of the sapin and its attendants. Our driver submitted to this act of violence much as a member of the Society of Friends allows a chamberlain to remove his hat from behind when he is favoured with an audience of the sovereign; and when we regained the high road, he meekly took up the reins and drove us at a good pace to Arc.

The village lies in a curiously open plain, with a girdle of hills, in one of which the glacières were supposed to lie. The first auberge refused us admittance, on the ground that the dinner was all pre-engaged, and the result was that we found a pleasanter place higher up the village, near a vast new maison de ville with every window shattered by recent hail. The people groaned over the unnecessary expense of this huge building, which might well, from its size, have been a home for the whole village; and they told us that the communal forests had been terribly over-cut to provide the money for it. Our first demand was for food; our next, for a guide to the glacières. Food we could have; but why should we wish to go to the glacières, when there was so much else worth seeing at a little distance?--a guide might without doubt be found, but there was nothing to be seen when we got there. We ordered prompt dinner, anything that happened to be ready, and desired the landlord to look out for a man to show us the way up the hills. When the dinner came, it was cold; and the main dish consisted apparently of something which had made stock for many generations of soup, and had then been kept in a half-warm state, ready to be heated for any passer-by who called for hot meat, till the cook had despaired of its ever being used, and had allowed it to become cold: at least, no other supposition seemed to account for its utter want of flavour, and the wonderful development of its fibres. As a matter of politeness, I asked the man what it was; when he took the dish from the table, smelled at it, and pronounced it veal.

There were also several specimens of the original old turnip-radish, with large shrubs of heads, and mature feelers many inches long. As all this was not very inviting, we ordered an omelette and some cheese; and when the omelette came, we found that the cook had combined our ideas and understood our order to mean a cheese-omelette, which was not so bad after all.

By this time, the landlord's visit to his drinking-room had procured a man willing to act as our guide. He was, unfortunately, more willing than able; for his sojourn in the drinking-room had told upon his powers of equilibrium. He asserted, as every one seemed in all cases to assert, that neither rope nor axe was in any way necessary. When I pressed the rope, he said that if monsieur was afraid he had better not go; so we told the landlord privately that the man was rather too drunk for a guide, and we must have another. The landlord thereupon offered himself, at the suggestion of his wife, who seemed to be the chief partner in the firm, and we were glad to accept his offer; while the incapacitated man whom we had rejected acquiesced in the new arrangement with a bow so little withering, and with such genuine politeness, that, in spite of his over-much wine, he won my heart. The landlord himself did not profess to know the glacières; but he knew the man who lived nearest to them, and proposed to lead us to his friend's châlet, whence we should doubtless be able to find a guide.

We stole a few moments for an inspection of the Church of Arc, and found, to our surprise, some very pleasing paintings in good repair, and open sittings which looked unusually clean and neat. Then we crossed the plain towards the north, and proceeded to grapple with a stiff path through the woods which climb the first hills. It turned out that there was no one available for our purpose in the châlet to which the landlord led us; but a small child was despatched in search of the master or the domestic, and returned before long with the latter individual, who received the mistress's instruction respecting the route, and received also an axe which I had begged in case of need. The accounts we had heard of the glacière or glacières--every one declined to call them caves--were so various, and the total denials of their existence so many, that we quietly made up our minds to disappointment, and agreed that what we had seen at the source of the Loue was quite sufficient to repay us for the trouble we had taken; while the idea of a rapid raid into France had something attractive in it, which more than counterbalanced the old charms of Soleure. Besides, we found that we were now in a good district for flowers, and the abundant Gnaphalium sylvaticum brought back to our minds many a delightful scramble in glacier regions, where its lovely velvet kinsman the pied-de-lion grows. On the broad top of the range of hills, covered with rich grass, we came upon large patches of a plant, with scented leaves and pungent seeds, which we had not known before, Meum athamanticum, and, to please our guide, we went through the form of pretending that we rather liked its taste. My sisters were in ecstasies of triumph over a wild everlasting-pea, which grew here to a considerable height--Lathyrus sylvestris, they said, Fr. Gesse sauvage, distinct from G. hétéropyhlle, which is still larger, and is almost confined to a favourite place of sojourn with us, the little Swiss valley of Les Plans. It is said that on the top of these hills springs of water rise to the surface, though there is no higher ground in the neighbourhood; a phenomenon which has been accounted for by the supposition of a difference of specific gravity between these springs and the waters which drive them up.

The character of the ground on the plateau changed suddenly, and we passed at one step, apparently, from a meadow of flowers to a wilderness of fissured rock, lying white and skeleton-like in the afternoon sun. We only skirted this rock in the first instance, and made for a clump of trees some little way off, in which we found a deep pit, with a path of sufficient steepness leading to the bottom. Here we came to a collection of snow, much sheltered by overhanging rocks and trees; and this, our guide told us, was the neigière, a word evidently formed on the same principle as glacière. The snow was half-covered with leaves, and was unpleasantly wet to our feet, so that we did not spend much time on it, or rather in it. A huge fragment of rock had at some time or other fallen from overhead, and now occupied a large part of the sloping bottom of the pit: by squeezing myself through a narrow crevice between this and the live rock, which looked as if it ought to lead to something, I found a veritable ice-cave, unhappily free from ornament, and of very small size, like a round soldier's tent in shape, with walls of rock and floor of ice. We afterwards found an easier entrance to the cave; but the floor was so wet, and the constant drops of water from the roof so little agreeable, that we got out again as soon as possible, especially as this was not the glacière we had come to see.

When we reached the surface once more, the landlord and the domestic both assured us that the neigière was the great sight, the glacière being nothing at all, but, such as it was, they would lead us to it. They took us to the fissured rock mentioned above; and when we looked down into the fissures, we saw that some of them were filled at the bottom with ice. They were not the ordinary fissures, like the crevasses of a glacier, but rather disconnected slits in the surface, opening into larger chambers in the heart of the rock, where the ice lay. In one part of this curious district the surface sank considerably, and showed nothing but a tumbled collection of large stones and rocks, piled in a most disorderly manner. By examining the neighbourhood of the larger of these rocks, we found a burrow, down which one of the men and I made our way, and thus, after some windings in the interior, reached a point from which we could descend to the ice. The impression conveyed to my mind by the whole appearance of the rock and ice was not unlike that of the domes in the Glacière of Monthézy; only that now the lower part of the dome was filled with ice, and we stood in the upper part. There were two or three of these domes, communicating one with another, and in all I found abundant signs of the prismatic structure, though no columns or wall-decoration remained. My sisters were accomplished in the art of burrowing, but they did not care to come down, and we soon rejoined them, spending a little time in letting down lighted bougies into the various domes and fissures, in order to study the movements of the air, but our experiments did not lead to much.

The landlord had evidently not believed in the existence of ice in summer, and his first thought was to take some home to his wife, to prove that we had reached the glacière and had found ice: such at least were the reasons he gave, but evidently his soul was imbued with a deep obedience to that better half, and the offering of a block of ice was suggested by a complication of feelings. When we reached the auberge again, we found the rejected guide still there, and more unstable than before. The general impression on his mind seemed to be that he had been wronged, and had forgiven us. In our absence he had been meditating upon the glacière, and his imagination had brought him to a very exalted idea of its wonders. Whereas, in the former part of the day, he had stoutly asserted that no cord could possibly be necessary, he now vehemently affirmed that if I had but taken him as guide, he would have let me down into holes 40 mètres deep, where I should have seen such things as man had never seen before. Had monsieur seen the source of the Loue? Yes, monsieur had. Very fine, was it not? Yes, very fine. Which did monsieur then prefer--the glacière, or the source? The source, infinitely. Then it was clear monsieur had not seen the glacière:--he was sure before that monsieur had not, now it was quite clear, for in all the world there was nothing like that glacière. The Loue!--one might rather see the glacière once, than live by the source of the Loue all the days of one's life.

It was now five o'clock, and the train left Pontarlier at half-past seven. We represented to M. Paget that he really ought to do the twenty kilomètres in two hours and a quarter, which would leave us a quarter of an hour to arrange our knapsacks and pay the National. He promised to do his best, and certainly the black horse proved himself a most willing beast. There was one long hill which damped our spirits, and made us give up the idea of catching the train; and here our driver came to the rescue with what sounded at first like a promising story--the only one we extracted from him all through the day--à propos of a memorial-stone on the road-side, where a man had lately been killed by two bears; but, when we came to examine into it, the romance vanished, for the man was a brewer's waggoner with a dray of beer, and the bears were tame bears, led in a string, which frightened the brewer's horses, and so the man was killed. Contrary to our expectations and fears, we did catch the train, and arrived in a thankful frame of mind at comfortable quarters in Neufchâtel.

CHAPTER IX.

THE SCHAFLOCH, OR TROU-AUX-MOUTONS, NEAR THE LAKE OF THUN.

The next morning, my sisters went one way and I another; they to a valley in the south-west of Vaud, where our head-quarters were to be established for some weeks, and I to Soleure, where a Swiss savant had vaguely told us he believed there was a glacière to be seen. That town, however, denied the existence of any approach to such a thing, with a unanimity which in itself was suspicious, and with a want of imagination which I had not expected to find. One man I really thought might be persuaded to know of some cave where there was or might be ice, but after a quarter of an hour's discussion he finally became immovable on the negative side. A Frenchman would certainly have been polite enough to accommodate facts to my desires. It was all the more annoying, because the Weissenstein stood overhead so engagingly, and I should have been only too glad to spend the night in the hotel there, if anyone had given me the slightest encouragement. I specially pointed at the neighbourhood of this hotel to my doubtful friend, as being likely for caves; but he was not in the pay of the landlord, and so failed to take the hint. There is a curious hole in which ice is found near Weissenstein in Carniola,[^[55]] and it is not impossible that this may have originated the idea of a glacière near Soleure.

The Schweizerhof at Berne is a very comfortable resting-place; but, in spite of its various excellences, if a tired traveller is told that No. 53 is to be his room, he will do well to seek a bed elsewhere. No. 53 is a sort of closet to some other number, with a single window opening low on to the passage, and is adjudged to the unfortunate individual who arrives at that omnipresent crisis which raises the charge for bed-rooms, and silences all objections to their want of comfort--namely, when there is only one bed left in the house. In itself, No. 53 would be well enough; but the throne of the chambermaid is in the passage, by the side of the window, and the male attendant on that particular stage naturally gravitates to the same point, when the bells of the stage do not summon him elsewhere, and often enough when they do. This combination leads of course to local disturbances of a somewhat noisy character, and however entirely a sleepy man may in principle sympathise with the causes of the noise, it becomes rather hard to bear after midnight. The precise actors on the present occasion have, no doubt, quarrelled or set up a café before now, or perhaps have achieved both results by taking the latter first; but there is reason to believe that so long as the window of No. 53 is the seat of the chambermaid for the time being, so long will that room be--as the landlord neatly expressed it when a protest was made--etwas unruhig.

All Switzerland has been playing at soldiers for some time, and as we left Berne the next morning, we saw three or four hundred Federal men of war marching down the road which runs parallel with the rails. The three officers at the head of the column were elderly and stout; moreover, they were mounted, and that fact was evidently due rather to the meekness of their chargers than to the grip of their own legs. When they saw the train coming, they took prompt measures. They halted the troops, and rode off down a side lane to be out of harm's way; and when we had well passed, they rejoined the column, and the march was resumed.

The early train from Berne catches the first boat on the Lake of Thun, and I landed at the second station on the lake, the village of Gonten or Gunten. M. Thury's list states that the glacière known as the Schafloch is on the Rothhorn, in the Canton of Berne, 4,500 mètres of horizontal distance from Merligen, a village on the shore of the lake; and from these data I was to find the cave. Gonten was apparently the nearest station to Merligen, and as soon as the small boat which meets the steamer had deposited me on the shore, I asked my way, first to the auberge, and then to Merligen. The auberge was soon found, and coffee and bread were at once ordered for breakfast; but when the people learned my eventual destination, they would not let me go to Merligen. A man, to whom--for no particular reason--I had given two-pence, called a council of the village upon me, and they proceeded to determine whether I must have a guide from Gonten, or only from a nameless châlet higher up. The discussion was noisy, and was conducted without words: they do not speak, those men of Gonten--they merely grunt, and each interprets the grunts as he wills. My two-penny friend told me what it all meant, in an obliging manner, but in words less intelligible than the grunts; and one member of the council drew out so elaborate a route--the very characters being wild patois--splitting the morning into quarter-stundes and half-quarter-stundes, with a sharp turn to the right or left at the end of each, that, as I drank my coffee, I determined to take a guide from the village, whatever the decision of the council might be. Fortunately, things took a right turn, and when breakfast was finished, a deputation went out and found a guide, suspiciously like one of their number who did not return, and I was informed that Christian Opliger would conduct me to the Schafloch for five francs, and a Trinkgeld if I were satisfied with him. In order to prove to me that he had really been at the cave, six days before, with two Bernese gentlemen, he seized my favourite low-crowned white hat, and endeavoured to knead it into the shape of the cave.

Our affairs took a long time to arrange, for grunts and pantomime are not rapid means of communication, when it comes to detail. The great question in Christian's mind seemed to be, what should we take with us to eat and drink? and when he propounded this to me with steady pertinacity, I, with equal pertinacity, had only one answer--a cord and a hatchet. At last he provided these, vowing that they were ridiculously unnecessary, but comprehending that they must be forthcoming, as a preliminary to anything more digestible; and then I told him, some dry bread and no wine. This drove him from grunts to words. No wine! it would be so frightfully hot on the mountains!--I told him I never drank wine when I was hot. But it would be so terribly cold in the cave!--I never drank wine when I was cold. But the climbing was sehr stark--we should need to give ourselves strength!--I never needed to give myself strength. There was no good water to be found the whole way!--I never drank water. Then, at last, after a brief grunt with the landlord, he struck:--he simply would not go without wine! I never wished him to do so, I explained; he might take as much as he chose, and I would pay for it, but he need not count me for anything in calculating how much was necessary. This made him perfectly happy; and when I answered his question touching cheese in a similar manner, only limiting him to a pound and a half, he rushed off for a large wicker hotte, spacious enough for the stowage of many layers of babies; and in it he packed all our properties, and all his provisions. The landlord had made his own calculations, and put it at 3lbs. of bread and 2lbs. of cheese; but I cut down the bread on account of its bulk, before I saw the size of the hotte, and Christian seemed to think he had quite enough to carry.

It was about half-past nine when we started from the auberge; and after a short mount in the full sun, we were not sorry to reach the pleasant shade of walnut trees which accompanied us for a considerable distance. The blue lake lay at our feet on the right, and beyond it the Niesen stood, with wonted grandeur, guarding its subject valleys; more in front, as we ascended transversely, the well-known snow-peaks of the Bernese Oberland glittered high above the nearer foreground, and, sheer above us, on the left, rose the ragged precipices whose flank we were to turn. The Rothhorn of the Canton Berne lies inland from the Lake of Thun, and sends down towards the lake a ridge sufficiently lofty, terminating in the Ralligstöcke, or Ralligflue, the needle-like point, so prettily ridged with firs, which advances its precipitous sides to the water. These precipices were formed in historic times, and the sheer face from which half a mountain has been torn stands now as clear and fresh as ever, while a chaos of vast blocks at its foot gives a point to the local legends of devastation and ruin caused by the various berg-falls. Two such falls are clearly marked by the débris: one of these, a hundred and fifty years ago, reduced the town of Ralligen to a solitary Schloss; and the other, in 1856, overwhelmed the village of Merligen, and converted its rich pastures into a desert cropped with stones. A traveller in Switzerland, at the beginning of this century, found that the inhabitants of Merligen were considered in the neighbourhood to be d'une stupidité et d'une bêtise extrêmes, and I am inclined to believe that after the last avalanche a general migration to Gonten must have taken place.

Christian's patois was of so hopeless a description, that I was tempted to give it up in despair, and walk on in silence. Still, as we were together for a whole long day, for better or for worse, it seemed worth while to make every effort to understand each other, else I could learn no local tales and legends, and Christian would earn but little Trinkgeld; so we struggled manfully against our difficulties. A confident American lady, meditating Europe, and knowing little French and no German, is said to have remarked jauntily that if the worst came to the worst she could always talk on her fingers to the peasants; but I did not attempt to avail myself of the results of early practice in that universal language. Christian's answers--the more intelligible parts of them--were a stratified succession of yes and no, and as he was a man naturally polite and acquiescent, the assentient strata were of more frequent occurrence; but of course, beyond showing his good-will, such answers were of no practical value. At length, after long perseverance, we were rewarded by the appearance of a curiosity which eventually gave each the key to the other's cipher. This was a strong stream of water, flowing out of the trunk of a growing tree, at a height of six feet or so from the ground; and I was so evidently interested in the phenomenon, that Christian exerted himself to the utmost, at last with success, to explain the construction of the fountain. A healthy poplar, seven or eight years old, is taken from its native soil, and a cold iron borer is run up the heart of the trunk from the roots, for six feet or more, by which means the pith is removed, and the trunk is made to assume the character of a pipe. A hole is then bored through from the outside of the trunk, to communicate with the highest point reached by the former operation, and in this second hole a spout is fixed. The same is done at a very short distance above the root, in the part of the trunk which will be buried in the earth when the tree is replanted, and the poplar is then fixed in damp ground, with the pipe at its root in connection with one of the little runs of water which abound in meadows at the foot of hills. A well-known property of fluids produces then the strange effect of an unceasing flow of water from an iron spout in the trunk of a living tree; and, as poplars love water, the fountain-tree thrives, and is more vigorous than its neighbours. This sort of fountain may be common in some parts of Switzerland, but I have not seen them myself except in this immediate neighbourhood. There is said to be one near Stachelberg.

In the endeavour to explain all this to me, Christian succeeded so perfectly, that for the rest of the day we understood each other very well. When I told him that he spoke much better German than the rest of the people in Gonten, he informed me that he had worked among foreigners, in proof whereof he held out his fingers; but all that I could gather from the invited inspection was, that, whatever his employment might have been, he could not be said to have come out of it with clean hands. He had been employed, he explained, in German dye-works, and there had learned something better than the native patois. About this time, too, I was able to make him understand that, as he carried more than I, he must call a halt whenever he felt so inclined; upon which he patted me affectionately on the back, and, if I could remember the word he used, I believe that I should now know the Swiss-German for a brick.

Our object was to pass along the side of the lake, at a considerable elevation, till we reached the east side of the Rothhorn range, when we were to turn up the Jüstisthal, and mount towards the highest point of the ridge, the glacière lying about an hour below the summit, in the face of the steep rock. The cliffs became very grand on either side, as soon as we entered this valley, the Jüstisthal, especially the precipices of the Beatenberg on the right; and our path lay through woods which have sprung up on the site of an early Berg-lauine. The guide-books call attention to a cavern with a curious intermittent spring in this neighbourhood. English tourists should feel some interest in the Cave of S. Beatus, inasmuch as its canonised occupant went from our shores to preach the Gospel to the wild men of the district, and died in this cave at a very advanced age. His relics remaining there, his fête-day attracted such crowds of pilgrims, that reforming Berne sent two deputies in 1528 to carry off the saint's skull, and bury it between the lakes; but still the pilgrimages continued, and at length the Protestant zeal of Berne went to the expense of a wall, and they built the pilgrims out in 1566. S. Beatus is said to have been converted by S. Barnabas in Britain, and to have gone to Rome, whence S. Peter sent him out to preach. His relics were conveyed to Lucerne in 1554, because heresy prevailed in the country where his cave lies, and an arm is among the proud possessions of pilgrim-pressed Einsiedeln. The saint was originally a British noble, by name Suetonius; and Dempster drops a letter from his name, and with much ingenuity makes him collateral ancestor of a Scottish family--'The Setons, tall and proud.'[^[56]]

When we arrived at the last châlet, Christian turned to mount the grass slope on our left hand, which led to the part of the rocks in which the entrance to the Schafloch was to be sought. I never climbed up grass so steep, and before we had gone very far we were hailed by a succession of grunts, which my companion interpreted into assurances from some invisible person that we were going wrong. The man soon appeared, in the shape of a charcoal-burner, and told us that we were making the ascent much more difficult than it need be made, and also, that we should come to some awkward rock-climbing by the route we had chosen. It was too late, however, to turn back; so we persevered.

Before long, I heard a Meinherr! from Christian, in a tone which I knew meant rest and some food. He explained that he would rather take two small refreshments, one here and one at the Schafloch, than one large refreshment at the cave; so we propped ourselves on the grass, and tapped the hotte. The cheese proved to be delightful--six years old, the landlady told us afterwards, and apparently as hard as a bone, but when once mastered its flavour was admirable. Christian persuaded me to taste the wine, of which he had a high opinion, and he was electrified by the universal shudder the one taste caused. The grapes from which it was brewed had been grown in a gooseberry garden, and all the saccharine matter carefully extracted; the wine had been left without a cork since the first dawn of its existence, and the heat and jolting of its travels on Christian's back had reduced it to the condition of warm flat vinegar. He drank it with the utmost relish, and was evidently reconciled to my verdict by the consideration that there would be all the more for him.

From the appearance of the bread and cheese when the meal had come to an end, I concluded that my companion had changed his mind in the course of feeding, and had resolved to compress the whole eating of the day into one large refreshment here. The consumptive powers of the Swiss-German peasant, when his meal is franked, has not unfrequently reminded me of the miraculous eating performed by a yellow domino of that nation, at the fête by which Louis XIV. celebrated the second marriage of the Dauphin. This domino was of large size, and ate and drank voraciously throughout the entertainment, which lasted many hours, retiring every five minutes or so, and returning speedily with unabated appetite. The thing became at length so portentous, that enquiries were instituted, and it was found that the trusty Cent-Suisses had joined at a domino, and were drawing lots all through the evening for the next turn at eating; so that each man's time was necessarily limited, and he accordingly made the most of it.

We soon took to the rocks, and found them, as the charcoal-burner had promised, sufficiently stiff work. Colonel (now General) Dufour visited the Schafloch with a party of officers in 1822, and he describes[^[57]] the path as a dangerous one, so much so that several of the gallant members of his party could not reach the cave: he uses rather large words about the precipices, and it is a matter of observation that military service on the Continent tends to induce a habit of body which is not the most suitable for doubtful climbing. The mountain seemed to be composed, in this part, of horizontal layers of crumbling shale, with a layer now and then of stone, about the thickness of an ordinary house-tile. The stone layers project from the looser masonry, and afford an excellent foot-hold; but a slip might be unpleasant. Every one who has done even a small amount of climbing has met with an abundance of places where 'a slip would be certain death,' as people are so fond of saying; but equally he has discovered that a slip is the last thing he thinks of making in such situations. Christian had told me that if I had the slightest tendency to Schwindelkopf, I must not go by the improvised route; but it proved that there were really no precipices at all, much less any of sufficient magnitude to turn an ordinary head dizzy. He chose these rocks as the text for a long sermon on the necessity for great caution when we should arrive at the cave, telling of an Englishman who had tried to visit it two years before, and had cut his knee so badly with his guide's axe that he had to be carried down the mountain to Gonten, and thence to the steamer for Thun, in which town he lay for many weeks in the hands of the German doctor; this last assertion being by no means incredible. Also, of a native who attempted the cave alone, and, making one false step near the top of a fall of ice, slipped down and down almost for ever, and finally landed with broken limbs on a floor of ice, where he was found, two days after, frozen stiff, but still alive.

It was not necessary to mount much, for we were almost as high as the mouth of the cave, according to Christian's belief, and our work consisted chiefly in passing along the face of the rock, round projecting buttresses and re-entering angles, till we reached that part of the mountain where we might expect to find our glacière. While we were thus engaged, two hoarse and ominous ravens took us under their charge, and accompanied us with unpleasant screams, which argued the proximity of food or nest. We soon found that we had disturbed their meal, for we came to marks of blood, and saw that some animal had slipped on the rocks above, and landed on the ledge on which we were walking, bounding off again on to a shelf below, where the ravens had already torn the body to pieces. I must confess to a very considerable shudder when we discovered the reason of their screams, and neither of us seemed to enjoy the circling and croaking of the unclean birds.

Very soon after this, Christian announced that we had reached the cave, and a steep little climb of six feet or so brought us to the entrance. Here we were haunted still by the presence of pieces of the fallen goat, which lay about here and there on the ground; and the flutter of wings overhead explained to us that the old ravens had built their nest in the mouth of the cave, and had brought morsels of raw flesh to their young ones, which were scarcely able to fly. I am ashamed to say that we were so angry with the old birds for shrieking so suggestively in our ears, and parading before us the results of a slip on the rocks, that we charged ourselves with stones, and put an end to the most noisy member of the foul brood; Christian making some of the worst shots it is possible to conceive, and raining blocks of stone and lumps of wood in all directions, with such reckless impartiality, that the only safe place seemed to be between him and the bird. One of us, at least, regretted the useless cruelty as soon as it was perpetrated, and it came back upon me very reproachfully at an awkward part of our return journey.

The Schafloch does not take its name from the bones contained in it, as is the case with the Kühloch in Franconia,[^[58]] but from the fact that when a sudden storm comes on, the sheep and goats make their way to the cave for shelter, never, I was told, going so far as the commencement of the ice. The entrance faces ESE., and is of large size, with a low wall built partly across it to increase the shelter for the sheep: Dufour calls the entrance 50 feet wide and 25 feet high, but I found the width at the narrowest part, a few yards within the entrance, to be 33 feet.[^[59]] For a short distance the cave passes horizontally into the rock, in a westerly direction, and is quite light; it then turns sharp to the south, the floor beginning to fall, and candles becoming necessary. Here the height increases considerably, and the way lies over a wild confusion of loose masses of rock, which have apparently fallen from the roof, and make progression very difficult. We soon reached a point where ice began to appear among the stones; and as we advanced it became more and more prominent, till at length we lost sight of the rock, and stood on solid ice.

On either side of the cave was a grand column of ice forming the portal, as it were, through which we must pass to further beauties. The ice-floor rose to meet these columns in a graceful swelling curve, perfectly continuous, so that the general effect was that of two columns whose roots expanded and met in the middle of the cave; and, indeed, that may have been really the order of formation. The right-hand column was larger than its fellow, but, owing to the more gradual expansion of the lower part of its height, and the steepness of the consequent slope, we were unable to measure its girth at any point where it could be fairly called a column. Christian had been in the cave a few days before, and he assured me that the swelling base of this column had increased very considerably since his last visit, pointing out a solid surface of ice, at one part of our track, where he had before walked on bare rock. The cave was by no means extremely cold, that is to say, it was rather above than below the freezing point, and the splashing of drops of water was audible on all sides; so that, if Christian spoke the truth,--it was sad to be so often reminded of Legree's plaintive soliloquy in the opening pages of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,'--the explanation, I suppose, might be that the drops of water, falling on the top of the column or stalagmite, run down the sides, and carry with them some melted portion from the upper part of the column, and after a course of a few yards become so far refrigerated as to form ice.[^[60]] The pillar on the left was more approachable, but we were unable to determine its dimensions; for on the outer side, where it stood a few feet or yards clear of the side of the cave, the rounded ice at its foot fell off at once into a dark chasm, a sort of smooth enticing Bergschrund, which we did not care to face. Christian declared that this column was not so high as it was a day or two before, which may go to support the theory expressed above, or at least that part of it which depends upon the supposition of water dropping on to the head of the column, and melting certain portions of it.

If we were unable to take the external dimensions of this column, I had no doubt that we should find internal investigations interesting; so, to Christian's surprise, I began to chop a hole in it, about two feet from the ground, and, having made an entrance sufficiently large, proceeded to get into the cavity which presented itself. The flooring of the dome-shaped grotto in which I found myself, was loose rock, at a level about two feet below the surface of the ice-floor on which Christian still stood. The dome itself was not high enough to allow me to stand upright, and from the roof, principally from the central part, a complex mass of delicate icicles passed down to the floor, leaving a narrow burrowing passage round, which was itself invaded by icicles from the lower part of the sloping roof, and by stubborn stalagmites of ice rising from the floor.[^[61]] The details of this central cluster of icicles, and in fact of every portion of the interior of the strange grotto, were exceedingly lovely, and I crushed with much regret, on hands and knees, through fair crystal forests and frozen dreams of beauty. In making the tour of this grotto, contorting my body like a snake to get in and out among the ice-pillars, and do as little damage as might be, but yet, with all my care, accompanied by the incessant shiver and clatter of breaking and falling ice, I came to a hole in the ground, too dark and deep for one candle to show its depth; so I called to Christian to come in, thinking that two candles might show it better. He asked if I really meant it, and assured me he could be of no use; but I told him that he must come, and informed him that he, being the smaller man, would find the passage quite easy. It was very fortunate that I had not waited a minute longer before summoning him, for just as he had dropped into the hollow, and was beginning his journey to the side where I now was, a drop of water and a simultaneous icicle came upon my candle, and left me in darkness, curled up like a dormouse in a nest of ice, at the edge of the newly discovered shaft; while my troubles were brought to a climax by an incursion of icy drops, which had me at their mercy. If all this had happened while Christian was still outside, he would probably have staid there wringing his hands till it was time to go home, and I should certainly not have liked to move without a light. As it was, I did not inform him of the catastrophe, but let him come toiling on, wondering audibly what madness could drive Herrschaft into such places; and when he arrived, we cut off the wet wick, and lighted the candle again. We could make nothing of the hole, so he returned by the way he had come, and I completed the tour of the grotto, finding the same difficult passage, and the same ice beauties, all the way round.

Having squeezed ourselves out again through the narrow hole, we now passed between the two gigantic columns, and found that the sea of ice became still broader and bolder. I much regret that I neglected to take any measurements in this part of the cave; but farther down, where it was certainly not so broad, I found the width of the ice to be 75 feet. It was throughout of the crystalline character which prevails in all the large masses in the glacières I have visited. For some distance beyond the columns, we found neither stalactites nor stalagmites--indeed, I forgot to look at the roof--until we came to the edge of a glorious ice-fall, down which Christian said it was impossible to go--no one had ever been farther than where we now stood. I have seen no subterranean ice-fall so grand as this, round and smooth, and perfectly unbroken, passing down, like the rapids of some river too deep for its surface to be disturbed, into darkness against which two candles prevailed nothing. The fall in the Upper Glacière of the Pré de S. Livres was strange enough, but it was very small, and led to a confined corner of the cavern; whereas this of the Schafloch rolls down majestically, cold and grey, into a dark gulf of which we could see neither the roof nor the end, while the pieces of ice which we despatched down the steep slope could be heard going on and on, as M. Soret says, à une très-grande distance. The shape, also, of the fall was very striking. Beginning at the left wall of the cave, the edge ran out obliquely towards the middle, when it suddenly turned and struck straight across to the right-hand wall, so that we were able to stand on a tongue, as it were, in the middle of the top of the fall. To add to the effect, precisely from this tongue or angle a fine column of ice sprang out of the very crest of the fall, rising to or towards the roof, and to this we clung to peer down into the darkness.

The rope we had brought was not long, and the idea was hopeless of cutting steps down this great fall, leading we knew not where, with an incline which it frightened Christian even to look at. I began to consider, however, whether it was not possible to make our way down the left branch of the ice, which fell rather towards the side wall than into the dark gulf below. On examining more closely, I found that a large stone, or piece of rock, projected from the face of this branch of the fall, about 12 feet from the top, and to this I determined to descend, as a preliminary to further attempts, the candles not showing us what there was beyond. Accordingly, I tied on the rope, and planted Christian where he had a safe footing, telling him to hold tight if I slipped, for he seemed to have little idea what the rope was meant for. The ice was very hard, and cutting steps downwards with a short axe is not easy work; so when I came within 3 or 4 feet of the rock, I forgot the rope, and set off for a short glissade. Christian, of course, thought something was wrong, and very properly put a prompt strain upon the rope, which reduced his Herr to a spread-eagle sort of condition, in which it was difficult to explain matters, so as to procure a release. When that was accomplished, I saw it would be easy to reach the point where the ice met the wall, so I called to Christian to come down, which he did in an unpremeditated, avalanche fashion; and then, by cutting steps here and there, and making use of odd points of rock, we skirted down the edge of the great fall, and reached at last the lower regions.

When I came to read Dufour's account of his visit in 1822, I found that the ice must have increased very much since his time. He uses sufficiently large words, speaking of the vaste, horrible et pourtant magnifique--of the horreur du séjour, and the grandeur des demeures souterraines; but he only calls the glorious ice-fall a plan incliné, and says that the whole was less remarkable for the amount of ice, than for the characteristics indicated by the words I have quoted. He says that it required une assez forte dose de courage to slip down to the stone of which I have spoken; the fact being that at the time of my visit it would have been impossible to do so with any chance of stopping oneself, for the flat surface of the stone was all but even with the ice. M. Soret, who saw the cave in 1860, determined that cords were then absolutely necessary for the descent, which he did not attempt; and the only Englishman I have met who has seen this cave, tells me that he and his party went no farther than the edge of the fall.[^[62]] Probably each year's accumulation on the upper floor of ice has added to the height and rapidity of the fall; but at any rate, when Dufour was there, des militaires--as he dashingly tells--were not to be stopped, and he and his party--such of them as had not been already stopped by the precipices outside--let themselves slip down to the stone, and thence descended as we did.

We soon found that the larger ice-fall looked extremely grand when seen from below, and that in a modified form it reached far down into the lower cave, and terminated in a level sea of ice; but, before making any further investigations into its size, we pressed on to look for the end of the cave. This soon appeared, and as a commentary on Christian's assertion that no one had ever been beyond the head of the fall, I called his attention to some initials smoked on the wall by means of a torch. There was an abrupt piece of rock-floor between this end and the termination of the ice. The western wall was ornamented with a long arcade of lofty columns of very white ice, looking strangely ghostlike by the light of two candles, crystallised, and with the porcelain appearance I have described before. We could not measure the height of these columns, but we found that they extended continuously, so as to be in fact one sheet of columns, connected by shapes of ice now graceful and now grotesque, for 27 yards. The ice from their feet flowed down to join the terminal lake, which formed a weird sea 28 yards by 14. My notes, written on the spot, tell me that between this lake, which I have called terminal, and the end of the cave, there is a sheet of ice 48 yards long, but it has entirely vanished from my recollection.

I now sent Christian back with a ball of string, up the steps we had cut for the descent, with directions to get as near as he could to the top of the main fall, and then send down a stone tied to the string, as I wished to determine the length of the fall. While he was making his way up, I amused myself by chopping and carving at the ice at various points to examine its structure, until at length a Jodel from above announced that Christian had reached his post; and a vast amount of hammering ensued, of which I could not understand the meaning. Presently he called out that 'it' was coming, and assuredly it did come. There was a loud crash on the upper part of the fall, and a shower of fragments of ice came whizzing past, and almost dislodged me; while the sound of pieces of ice bounding and gliding down the slope seemed as if it never would cease. It turned out to mean that my friend had not been able to find a stone; so he had smashed a block of ice from the column which presided over the fall, and having attached the string to this, had hurled the whole apparatus in my direction, fortunately not doing as much damage as he might have done. My end of the string was not to be seen, so he repeated the experiment, with a piece of wood in place of the block of ice, and this time it succeeded. We found that from top to bottom of the fall was 45 yards. There was all the appearance of immense thickness, especially towards the upper part.

Christian had placed his candle in a niche in the column, while he arranged the string for measuring the fall, and the effect of the spark of light at the top of the long steep slope was extremely strange from below. The whole scene was so remarkable, that it required some effort to realise the fact that I was not in a dream. Christian stood at the top invisible, jodeling in a most unearthly manner, and developing an astonishing falsetto power, only interrupting his performance to assure me that he was not coming down again; so I was obliged to measure the breadth of the fall by myself. I chose a part where the ice was not very steep, and where occasional points of rock would save some of the labour of cutting steps; but even so it was a sufficiently tedious business. The string was always catching at something, and mere progression, without any string to manage, would have been difficult enough under the circumstances. It was completely dark, so a candle occupied one hand, and, as every step must be cut, save where an opportune rock or stone appeared, an axe occupied the other; then there was the string to be attended to, and both hands must be ready to clutch at some projecting point when a slip came, and now and then a ruder rock required circumvention. Add to all this, that hands and feet had not been rendered more serviceable by an hour and a half of contact with ice, and it will easily be understood that I was glad when the measurement was over. At this point the breadth was 25 yards, and, a few feet above the line in which I crossed, all traces of rock or stone disappeared, and there was nothing but unbroken ice. I had of course abundant opportunities for examining the structure of the ice, and I found in all parts of the fall the same large-grained material, breaking up, when cut, into the usual prismatic nuts.

I now rejoined Christian, and we worked our way upwards to the mouth of the cave, penitently desisting from stoning a remaining raven. We observed at the very mouth, by watching the flame of the candles, a slight current outwards, extremely feeble, and on our first arrival I had fancied there was a current, equally slight, inwards, but neither was perceptible beyond the entrance of the cave. M. Soret was fortunate enough to witness a curious phenomenon, at the time of his visit to the Schafloch, in September 1860, which throws some light upon the atmospheric state of the cave. The day was externally very foggy, and the fog had penetrated into the cavern; but as soon as M. Soret began to descend to the glacière itself, properly so called, he passed down out of the fog, and found the air for the rest of the way perfectly clear.[^[63]]

M. Soret states that he has not absolute confidence in his thermometrical observations, but as he had more time than I to devote to such details, inasmuch as he did not pass down into the lowest part of the cave, I give his results rather than my own, which were carelessly made on this occasion:--On a stone near the first column of ice, 0°·37 C.; on a stick propped against the column on the edge of the great ice-fall, 2°·37 C.; in a hole in the ice, filled with water by drops from the roof, 0° C. approximately.[^[64]] The second result is sufficiently remarkable. My own observations would give nearer 33° F. than 32° as the general temperature of the cave.

Christian was so cold when we had finished our investigations, that he determined to take his second refreshment en route, and, moreover, time was getting rather short. We had started from Gonten at half-past nine in the morning, and reached the glacière about half-past twelve. It was now three o'clock, and the boat from Gonten must reach the steamer at half-past six precisely, so there was not too much time for us; especially as we were to return by a more mountainous route, which involved further climbing towards the summit of the Rothhorn, and was to include a visit to the top of the Ralligflue. On emerging from the cave, we were much struck by the beauty of the view, the upper half of the Jungfrau, with its glittering attendants and rivals, soaring above a rich and varied foreground not unworthy of so glorious a termination. There was not time, however, to admire it as it deserved, and we set off almost at once up the rocks, soon reaching a more elevated table-land by dint of steep climbing. The ground of this table-land was solid rock, smoothed and rounded by long weathering, and fissured in every direction by broad and narrow crevasses 2 or 3 feet deep, at the bottom of which was luxuriant botany, in the shape of ferns, and mallows, and monkshood, and all manner of herbs. The learned in such matters call these rock-fallows Karrenfelden. When we had crossed this plateau, and came to grass, we found a gorgeous carpet of the huge couched blue gentian (G. acaulis, Fr. Gentiane sans tige), with smaller patterns put in by the dazzling blue of the delicate little flower of the same species (G. verna ); while the white blossoms of the grass of Parnassus, and the frailer white of the dryade à huit petales, and the modest waxen flowers of the Azalea procumbens and the airelle ponctuée (Vaccineum vitis idaea), tempered and set off the prevailing blue. There were groves, too, rather lower down, of Alpine roses (the first I had come across that year), not the fringed or the green-backed species which botanists love best, but the honest old rust-backed rhododendron, which every Swiss traveller has been pestered with in places where the children are one short step above mere mendicity, but, equally, which every Swiss traveller hails with Medean delight when he comes upon it on the mountain-side. We were now, too, in the neighbourhood of the first created Alpen rose. The story is, that a young peasant, who had climbed the precipices behind Oberhausen for rock-flowrets, as the price of some maiden's love, fell at the moment when he had secured the flowers, and was killed. From his blood the true Alpen rose sprang, and took its colour.

We were now passing along the summit of one of the lower spurs of the Rothhorn range, and making for the peak of the Ralligflue, which lay considerably below us. In descending near the line of crest, we found a large number of very deep fissures, narrow and black, some of them extending to a great distance across the face of the hill; sometimes they appeared as mere holes, down which we despatched stones, sometimes as unpleasant crevasses almost hidden by flowers and the shrubs of rhododendron. In many of these we dimly discovered accumulated snow at the bottom, and we observed that the Alpine roses which overhung the snow-holes were by far the deepest coloured and most beautiful we could find.

To reach the Ralligflue, we had to cross a smooth green lawn completely covered with the sweet vanilla orchis (O. nigra), which perfumed the air almost too powerfully. No one can ever fully appreciate the grandeur of the lion-like Niesen till he has seen it from this verdant little paradise, on the slope near the Bergli Châlet, with a diminutive limpid lake in the meadow at his feet, and the blue lake of Thun below. The Kanderthal and the Simmenthal lie exposed from their entrance at the foot of the Niesen; and when the winding Kanderthal is lost, the Adelbodenthal takes up the telescope, and guides the eye to the parent glaciers. This view I was fortunately able to enjoy rather longer than that from the mouth of the Schafloch; for we had made such rapid way, that Christian found there was time for a meal of milk in the châlet, and meanwhile left me lying in perfect luxury on the sweet grass.

From the Ralligflue a long and remarkably steep zigzag leads to the lower ground, and down this Christian ran at full speed, jodeling in a most trying manner; indeed, at one of the sudden turns of the path he went off triumphantly into a falsetto so unearthly, that he lost his legs, and landed in a promiscuous sort of way on a lower part of the zigzag, after which he was slower and less vocal.

We eventually reached Gonten so soon, that there was time to cool and have a bath in the lake; and when that was nearly finished, Christian brought a plate of cherries and a detachment of the village, and I ate the cherries and held a levée in the boat--very literally a levée, as the dressing was by no means accomplished when the deputation arrived. My late guide, now, as he said, a friend for life, made a speech to the people, setting forth that he had done that day what he had never thought to do; for, often as he had been to the entrance of the Schafloch--five or six times at the least--he had never before reached the end of the cave. And to whom, he asked, did he owe it? All previous Herrschaft under his charge had cried Immer zurück! but this present Herr had known but one cry, Immer vorwärts! Luckily the steamer now approached, so the speech came to an end, and he shook hands affectionately, with a vigour that would certainly have transmitted some of the dye, if that material had not become a part of the skin which it coloured. Then the village also shook hands, having evidently understood what Christian said, notwithstanding the fact that it was intelligible German, and I returned to Thun and Berne.

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 fêting 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]]

CHAPTER X.

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

M. Thury's list contained a bare mention of two glacières 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 Hôtel de Genève is probably the least objectionable of the hotels of Annecy; but the Poste-bureau is at the Hôtel 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 Hôtel 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-à-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-à-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 Hôtel d'Angleterre, the eventual bill made me angry, and I should certainly try the Hôtel de Genève 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 glacières 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 glacières 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 glacières 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 glacières; on which he assured me that he knew every inch of the mountain, and there was not such a thing as a glacière 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 glacières, 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 café, whose master was the monsieur for whom we were in search. Know the glacière?--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 cafétier--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, à 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 glacière. 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 glacière, 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. François 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, 'Entrée de l'Hôtel.' 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 glacière. 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 glacière, 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. Métral (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 glacière, 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 glacières. 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 châlets higher up on the mountain. The glacière 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 curés of small communes had about £40 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 (Bädeker'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 traîneaux like a black avalanche. A traîneau 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 châlet, 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 châlet 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:--

Some of the solids and fluids in the earlier part of this carte we felt tolerably sure of finding at the maire's châlet, and accordingly any amount of cream and séret proved to be forthcoming. The maire asserted that cérac was the true name of this recommendable article of food, céré being the patois for the original word. Others had told us that the real word was serré, meaning compressed curds; but the French writers who treat learnedly of cheese-making in the Annales de Chimie adopt the form sérets; 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 caillé, 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 caillé 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 châlet 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 châlet, 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 châlet, we found the mouth of the glacière, 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 glacière itself is approached by descending one side of a deep pit, whose circumference is larger than that of any other of the pit-glacières I have seen. A few yards off there is a smaller shaft in the rock, which we afterwards found to communicate with the glacière. 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 glacière, 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.

VERTICAL SECTION OF THE GLACIÈRE OF GRAND ANU, NEAR ANNECY.

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 glacière. 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 glacière 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 dégel 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.