Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland

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 exist

t 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

t--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 pr

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 th

tual 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 chalet 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-qu

o 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 n

rn. 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 Ralligst?cke, 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. Tw

, 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

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

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 expens

efore 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, a

lady 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 matt

quently 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 sp

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 fo

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

e, 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

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

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

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 jour

ll, 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 th

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

ted. 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

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 extend

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 fro

he 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 a

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 atmosph

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 hol

eserved, 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 proc

ep 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

lope near the Bergli Chalet, 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 gu

g in a most trying manner; indeed, at one of the sudden turns of the path he went off triumphantly into a falsetto so unearthly, tha

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 vorw?rts! Luckil

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 su