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. 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.
[Illustration: LOWER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S. LIVRES.]
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. 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.
[Illustration: SECTION OF THE LOWER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S. LIVRES.]
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.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 18: _Sancti Liberii locus_, the Swiss Dryasdust explains.
There is nothing to connect any known S. Liberius with this
neighbourhood, unless it be the Armenian prince who secretly left his
father's court for Jerusalem, and was sought for throughout Burgundy and
other countries. It seems that Saint Oliver is merely a corruption of S.
Liberius, the Italian form of the latter, Santo Liverio, having become
Sant-Oliverio, as S. Otho became in another country Sant Odo, and thence
San Todo, thus creating a new Saint, S. Todus.--Act SS. May 27.]
[Footnote 19: My sisters made a two-days' excursion from Arzier to this
glacière in the autumn of 1862, and found no snow in the bottom of the
pit. They took the route by Gimel to Bière, intending to defer the visit
to the glacière to the morning of the second day; but being warned by
the appearance known locally as _le sappeur qui fume_, a vaporous cloud
at the mouth of a cavern near the Dent d'Oche, on the other side of the
Lake of Geneva, they caught the communal forester at once, and put
themselves under his guidance. The distance from Bière is two hours'
good walking, and an hour and a half for the return. There was no ladder
for the final descent, and the neighbouring châlet could provide nothing
longer than 15 feet, the drop being 30 feet. Two Frenchmen had attempted
to make their way to the cave a week before; but the old 30-foot ladder
of the previous year broke under the foremost of them, and he fell into
the pit, whence he was drawn up by means of a cord composed of
rack-ropes from the châlet, tied together. However useful a string of
cow-ties may be for rescuing a man from such a situation, A. and M. did
not care to make use of that apparatus for a voluntary descent, so they
were perforce contented with a distant view of the ice from the lower
edge of the pit.]
[Footnote 20: See the section of this cave and pit on page 41.]
* * * * *