Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland

ain 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 th

o 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 fo

ation 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

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 villag

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 wa

ile 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 re

he 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 b

ve 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

e 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, evi

E OF THE PRé

f stones, till a light was struck. The accomplice did not find it in the bond that he

homed. 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

ss 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 o

ER GLACIèRE OF THE

ulled up a few feet more of string than was necessary, but 50

ount 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

d 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 indication

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 of

ble 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 bala

d. 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,