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. 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.
[Illustration: VERTICAL SECTION OF THE GLACIÈRE OF MONTHÉZY, IN THE VAL
DE TRAVERS.]
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. 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.
[Illustration: GROUND PLAN OF THE GLACIÈRE OF MONTHÉZY. Note: The
candle stood at this point.]
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]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 48: _Aigue_, or _egue_, in the patois of this district, is
equivalent to _eau_, the Latin _aqua_.]
[Footnote 49: Ebel, in his _Swiss Manual_ (French translation of 1818,
t. iii.), mentions this glacière under the head _Motiers_, and observes
that it and the grotto of S. Georges are the only places in the Jura
where ice remains through the summer. This statement, in common with a
great part of Ebel, has been transferred to the letterpress of
_Switzerland Illustrated_.]
[Footnote 50: Switzerland sent 7,500,000 gallons of absinthe to France
in 1864.]
[Footnote 51: _Point d'argent, point de Suisse_, is a proverbial
expression which the Swiss twist into a historical compliment, asserting
that it arose in early mercenary times, from the fact that they were too
virtuous to accept the suggestion of the general who hired them, and
wished them to take their pay in kind from the defenceless people of the
country they had served.]
[Footnote 52: It is probable that the ice is on the increase in this
glacière, and that an archway, now filled up by the growing ice, has at
one time existed in the wall on this side of the care, through which the
ice and water used to pour into the subterranean depths of which the old
woman had told us. At the time of our visit, we could find no outlet.]
[Footnote 53: The following remarks may give some explanation of the
phenomenon of alternating currents in this cave, I should suppose that
during the night there is atmospheric equilibrium in the cave itself,
and in the three pits A, B, C. When the heat of the sun comes into
operation, the three pits are very differently affected by it, C being
comparatively open to the sun's rays, while A is much less so, and B is
entirely sheltered from radiation. This leads naturally to atmospheric
disturbance. The air in the pit C is made warmer and less heavy than
that in A and B, and the consequence is, that the column of air in C can
no longer balance the columns in A and B, which therefore begin to
descend, and so a current of air is driven from the cave into the pit C.
Owing to the elasticity of the atmosphere, even at a low temperature,
this descent, and the consequent rush of air into C, will be overdone,
and a recoil must take place, which accounts for the return current into
the cave from the pit C. The sun can reach A more easily than B, and
thus the air is lighter and more moveable in the former pit, so that the
recoil will make itself more felt in A than in B: accordingly, we found
that the main currents alternated between A and C, with very slight
disturbance in the neighbourhood of B. B will, however, play its part,
and the weighty column of air contained in it will oscillate, though
with smaller oscillations than in the case of A. Probably, when the sun
has left A, while acting still upon C, the return current from C will be
much slighter, and there will be a general settling of the atmosphere in
the pits A and B, until C also is freed from the sun's action, when the
whole system will gradually pass into a state of equilibrium.
With respect to the action of the more protected pits, the principle of
the hydraulic ram not unnaturally suggests itself.
In considering the minor details of the currents, such elements as the
refrigeration of the air in its passage across the face of the ice must
be taken into account. It may be observed that the candle did not occupy
an _intermediate_ position with respect to two opposing currents, for it
was practically on the floor of the cave, owing to the continuity of the
slope of snow on which it stood, as shown in the vertical section on p.
108.]
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