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.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 54: _Cruel comme à Morat_ was long a popular saying.]
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