Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland Part 1

Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland.

by George Forrest Browne.

PREFACE.

The existence of natural ice-caves at depths varying from 50 to 200 feet below the surface of the earth, unconnected with glaciers or snow mountains, and in lat.i.tudes and at alt.i.tudes where ice could not under ordinary circ.u.mstances be supposed to exist, has attracted some attention on the Continent; but little or nothing seems to be practically known in England on the subject. These caves are so singular, and many of them so well repay inspection, that a description of the twelve which I have visited can scarcely, as it seems to me, be considered an uncalled-for addition to the numerous books of travel which are constantly appearing. In order to prevent my narrative from being a mere dry record of natural phenomena, I have interspersed it with such incidents of travel as may be interesting in themselves or useful to those who are inclined to follow my steps. I have also given, from various sources, accounts of similar caves in different parts of the world.

A pamphlet on _Glacieres Naturelles_ by M. Thury, of Geneva, of the existence of which I was not aware when I commenced my explorations, has been of great service to me. M. Thury had only visited three glacieres when he published his pamphlet in 1861, but the observations he records are very valuable. He had attempted to visit a fourth, when, unfortunately, the want of a ladder of sufficient length stopped him.

I was allowed to read Papers before the British a.s.sociation at Bath (1864), in the Chemical Section, on the prismatic formation of the ice in these caves, and in the Geological Section, on their general character and the possible causes of their existence.

It is necessary to say, with regard to the sections given in this book, that, while the proportions of the ma.s.ses of ice are in accordance with measurements taken on the spot, the interior height of many of the caves, and the curves of the roof and sides, are put in with a free hand, some of them from memory. And of the measurements, too, it is only fair to say that they were taken for the most part under very unfavourable circ.u.mstances, in dark caves lighted by one, or sometimes by two candles, with a temperature varying from slightly above to slightly below the freezing-point, and with no surer foot-hold than that afforded by slippery slopes of ice and chaotic blocks of stone. In all cases, errors are due to want of skill, not of honesty; and I hope that they do not generally lie on the side of exaggeration.

CAMBRIDGE: _June_ 1865.

CHAPTER I.

THE GLACIeRE OF LA GENOLLIeRE, IN THE JURA.

In the summer of 1861, I found myself, with some members of my family, in a small rustic _pension_ in the village of Arzier, one of the highest villages of the pleasant slope by which the Jura pa.s.ses down to the Lake of Geneva. The son of the house was an intelligent man, with a good knowledge of the natural curiosities which abound in that remarkable range of hills, and under his guidance we saw many strange things. More than once, he spoke of the existence of a _glaciere_ at no great distance, and talked of taking us to see it; but we were sceptical on the subject, imagining that _glaciere_ was his patois for _glacier_, and knowing that anything of the glacier kind was out of the question. At last, however, on a hot day in August, we set off with him, armed, at his request, with candles; and, after two or three hours of pine forests, and gra.s.s glades, and imaginary paths up rocky ranges of hill towards the summits of the Jura, we came to a deep natural pit, down the side of which we scrambled. At the bottom, after penetrating a few yards into a chasm in the rock, we discovered a small low cave, perfectly dark, with a flooring of ice, and a pillar of the same material in the form of a headless woman, one of whose shoulders we eventually carried off, to regale our parched friends at Arzier. We lighted up the cave with candles, and sat crouched on the ice drinking our wine, finding water, which served the double purpose of icing and diluting the wine, in small basins in the floor of ice, formed apparently by drops falling from the roof of the cave.

A few days after, our guide and companion took us to an ice-cavern on a larger scale, which, we were told, supplies Geneva with ice when the ordinary stores of that town fail; and the next year my sisters went to yet another, where, however, they did not reach the ice, as the ladder necessary for the final drop was not forthcoming.

In the course of the last year or two, I have mentioned these glacieres now and then in England, and no one has seemed to know anything about them; so I determined, in the spring of 1864, to spend a part of the summer in examining the three we had already seen or heard of, and discovering, if possible, the existence of similar caves.

The first that came under my notice was the Glaciere of La Genolliere; and, though it is smaller and less interesting than most of those which I afterwards visited, many of its general features are merely reproduced on a larger scale in them. I shall therefore commence with this cave, and proceed with the account of my explorations in their natural order.

It is probable that some of the earlier details may seem to be somewhat tedious, but they are necessary for a proper understanding of the subject.

La Genolliere is the _montagne_, or mountain pasturage and wood, belonging to the village of Genollier, an ancient priory of the monks of S. Claude.[1] The cave itself lies at no great distance from Arzier--a village which may be seen in profile from the Grand Quai of Geneva, ambitiously climbing towards the summit of the last slope of the Jura.

To reach the cave from Geneva, it would be necessary to take train or steamer to Nyon, whence an early omnibus runs to S. Cergues, if crawling up the serpentine road can be called running; and from S. Cergues a guide must be taken across the Fruitiere de Nyon, if anyone can be found who knows the way. From Arzier, however, which is nine miles up from Nyon, it was not necessary to take the S. Cergues route; and we went straight through the woods, past the site of an old convent and its drained fish-pond, and up the various rocky ridges of hill, with no guide beyond the recollection of the previous visits two and three years before, and a sort of idea that we must go north-west. As it was not yet July, the cows had not made their summer move to the higher chalets, and we found the mountains uninhabited and still.

The point to be made for is the upper Chalet of La Genolliere, called by some of the people _La Baronne_, [2] though the district map puts La Baronne at some distance from the site of the glaciere. We had some difficulty in finding the chalet, and were obliged to spread out now and then, that each might hunt a specified portion of the wood or glade for signs to guide our further advance, enjoying meanwhile the lilies of the mountain and lilies of the valley, and fixing upon curious trees and plants as landmarks for our return. In crossing the last gra.s.s, we found the earliest vanilla orchis (_Orchis nigra_) of the year, and came upon beds of moonwort (_Botrychium Lunaria_) of so unusual a size that our progress ceased till such time as the finest specimens were secured.

Some time before reaching this point, we caught a glimpse of a dark speck on the highest summit in sight, which recalled pleasantly a night we had spent there three years before for the purpose of seeing the sun rise.[3] My sisters had revisited the Chalet des Chevres, which this dark speck represented, in 1862, and found that the small chamber in which we had slept on planks and logs had become a more total ruin than before, in the course of the winter, so that it is now utterly untenable.

From Arzier to the Chalet of La Genolliere, would be about two hours, for a man walking and mounting quickly, and never losing the way; and the glaciere lies a few minutes farther to the north-west, at an elevation of about 2,800 feet above the lake, or 4,000 feet above the sea.[4] A rough mountain road, leading over an undulating expanse of gra.s.s, pa.s.ses narrowly between two small clumps of trees, each surrounded by a low circular wall, the longer diameter of the enclosure on the south side of the road being 60 feet. In this enclosure is a natural pit, of which the north side is a sheer rock, of the ordinary limestone of the Jura, with a chasm almost from the top; while the south side is less steep, and affords the means of scrambling down to the bottom, where a cave is found at the foot of the chasm, pa.s.sing under the road. The floor of this small but comparatively lofty cave is 52 feet below the surface of the earth, and slopes away rapidly to the west, where, by the help of candles, the rock which forms the wall is seen to stop short of the floor, leaving an entrance 2 or 3 feet high to an inner cave--the glaciere.

The roof of this inner cave rises slightly, and its floor falls, so that there is a height of about 6 feet inside, excepting where a large open fissure in the roof pa.s.ses high up towards the world above. At one end, neither the roof nor the floor slopes much, and in this part of the cave the height is less than 3 feet.

It would be very imprudent to go straight into an ice-cave after a long walk on a hot summer's day, so we prepared to dine under the shade of the trees at the edge of the pit, and I went down into the cave for a few moments to get a piece of ice for our wine. My first impression was that the glaciere was entirely destroyed, for the outer cave was a mere chaos of rock and stones; but, on further investigation, it turned out that the ruin had not reached the inner cave. In our previous visit we had noticed a natural basin of some size and depth among the trees on the north side of the road, and we now found that the chaos was the result of a recent falling-in of this basin; so that from the bottom of the first cave, standing as it were under the road, we could see daylight through the newly-formed hole.

The total length of the floor of the inner cave, which lies north-east and south-west, is 51 feet; and of this floor a length of about 37 feet was more or less covered with ice, the greatest breadth of the ice being within an inch or two of 11 feet. Excepting in the part of the cave already mentioned as being less than 3 feet high, we found the floor not nearly so dry, nor so completely covered with ice, as when we first saw the glaciere, three years before, in the middle of an exceptionally hot August. Under the low roof all was very dry, though even there the ice had not an average thickness of more than 8 inches. It may be as well to say, once for all, that the ice in these caves is never found in a sheet on a pool of water; it is always solid, forming the floor of the cave, filling up the interstices of the loose stones, and rising above them, in this case with a surface perfectly level.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ICE-COLUMNS IN THE GLACIeRE OF LA GENOLLIeRE.]

We found four princ.i.p.al columns of ice, three of which, in the loftiest part of the cave, are represented in the accompanying engraving: I call them three, and not two, because the two which unite in a common base proceeded from different fissures. The line of light at the foot of the rock-wall is the only entrance to the glaciere. The lowest column was 11-2/3 feet high and 1-2/3 feet broad, not more than 6 inches thick in the middle, half-way up, and flattened symmetrically so as to be comparatively sharp at the edges, like a huge double-edged sword. It stood clear of the rock through its whole height, but scarcely left room between itself and the wall of the cave for a candle to be pa.s.sed up and down. The other two columns shown in the engraving poured out of fissures in the rock, streaming down as cascades, the one being 13-1/2 and the other 15 feet high; and when we tied a candle to the end of an alpenstock, and pa.s.sed it into the fissures, we found that the bend of the fissures prevented our seeing the termination of the ice. An intermittent disturbance of the air in these fissures made the flame flicker at intervals, though generally the candle burned steadily in them, and we could detect no current in the cave. The fourth column was in the low part of the cave, and we were obliged to grovel on the ice to get its dimensions: it was 3-1/4 feet broad and 4-1/3 feet high, the roof of the cave being only 2-3/4 feet high; and it poured out of the vertical fissure like a smooth round fall of water, adhering lightly to the rock at its upper end like a fungus, and growing out suddenly in its full size. This column was dry, whereas on the others there were abundant symptoms of moisture, as if small quant.i.ties of water were trickling down them from their fissures, though the fissures themselves appeared to be perfectly dry.

In one of the fissures there was a patch of what is known as sweating-stone, [5] with globules of water oozing out, and standing roundly upon it: the globules were not frozen. This stone was exceedingly hard, and defied all our efforts to break off a specimen, but at last we got two small pieces, hard and heavy, and wrapped them in paper; ten weeks after, we found them of course quite dry, and broke them easily, small as they were, with our fingers. The fissure from which the shortest of the four columns came was full of gnats, as were also several crevices in the walls of the cave, especially in the lowest part; and we found a number of large red-brown flies, [6]

nearly an inch long, running rapidly on the ice and stones, after the fas.h.i.+on of the flies with which trout love best to be taken. The central parts of the cave, where the roof is high, were in a state provincially known as 'sloppy,' and drops of water fell now and then from above, either splas.h.i.+ng on wet stones, or hollowing out basins in the remaining ice, or, sometimes, shrewdly detecting the most sensitive spot in the back of the human neck. We placed one of Casella's thermometers on a piece of wood on one of the wet stones, clear of the ice, and it soon fell to 34. Probably the temperature had been somewhat raised by the continued presence of three human beings and two lighted candles in the small cavern; and, at any rate, the cold of two degrees above freezing was something very real on a hot summer's day, and told considerably upon my sisters, so that we were compelled to beat a retreat,--not quite in time, for one of our party could not effect a thaw, even by stamping about violently in the full afternoon sun.

While we were in the cave, we noticed that the surfaces of the columns were covered by very irregular lines, marked somewhat deeply in the ice, and dividing the surface into areas of all shapes, a sort of network, with meshes of many different shapes and sizes. These areas were smaller towards the edges of the columns; the lines containing them were not, as a rule, straight lines, and almost baffled our efforts to count them, but, to the best of my belief, there were meshes with three, four, and up to eight sides. The column which stood clear of the rock was composed of very limpid ice, without admixture of air; but the cascades were interpenetrated by veins of looser white ice, and, where the white ice came, the surface lines seemed to disappear. As we sat on the gra.s.s outside, arranging our properties for departure, my attention was arrested by the columnar appearance of the fractured edge of the block of ice which we had used at luncheon. It was about 5 inches thick, and had formed part of a stalagmite whose horizontal section, like that of the free column, would be an ellipse of considerable eccentricity; and, on examination, it turned out that the surface areas, which varied in size from a large thumb-nail to something very small, were the ends of prisms reaching through to the other side of the piece of ice, at any rate in the thinner parts, and presenting there similar faces. Not only so, but the prisms could be detached with great ease, by using no instrument more violent than the fingers; while the point of a thin knife entered freely at any of the surface lines, and split the ice neatly down the sides of the prisms. When one or two of the sides of a prism were exposed, at the edge of the piece of ice, the prism could be pushed out entire, like a knot from the edge of a piece of wood. In some cases there seemed to be capillary fissures coincident with the lines where several sides of prisms met. Considering the shape of the whole column, it is clear that the two ends of each prism could not be parallel; neither was one of the ends perfectly symmetrical with the other, and I do not think that the prisms were of the nature of truncated pyramids. On descending again, I found that the columns were without exception formed of this prismatic ice, either in whole, as in the clear column, or in part, as where limpid prisms existed among the white ice which ran in veins down the cascades. In the free vertical column the prisms seemed to be deposited horizontally, and in the thicker parts they did not pa.s.s clear through. We carried a large piece of ice down to Arzier in a botanical tin, and on our arrival there we found that all traces of external lines had disappeared.

This visit to the glaciere was on Sat.u.r.day, and on the following Monday I determined to go up alone, to take a registering thermometer, and leave it in the cave for the night; which, of course, would entail a third visit on the next day. Monday brought a steady penetrating rain, of that peculiar character which six Scotch springs had taught me to describe as 'just a bit must;' while in the higher regions the fog was so hopeless, that a sudden lift of the mist revealed the unpleasant fact that considerable progress had been made in a westerly direction, the true line being north-west. Instead of the rocks of La Genolliere, the foreground presented was the base of the Dole, and the chasm which affords a pa.s.sage from the well-known fortress of Les Rousses into Vaud.

There was nothing for it but to turn in the right direction, or attempt to do so, and force a way through the wet woods till something should turn up. This something took the form of a chalet; but no amount of hammering and shouting produced any response, and it was only after a forcible entrance, and a prolonged course of interior shouting, that a man was at length drawn. He said that he had been asleep--and why he put it in a past tense is still a mystery--and could give no idea of the direction of the chalet on La Genolliere, beyond a vague suggestion that it was somewhere in the mist; a suggestion by no means improbable, seeing that the mist was ubiquitous. One piece of information he was able to give, and it was consoling: I was now, it seemed, on the Fruitiere de Nyon, and therefore the desired chalet could not be far off, if only a guide could be found. On the whole, he thought that a guide could not be found; but there were men in the chalet, and I might go up the ladder with him and see what could be done. He led to a chamber with a window of one small pane, dating apparently from the first invention of gla.s.s, and never cleaned since. An invisible corner of the room was appealed to; but the voice which resided there, and seemed like everything else to be asleep, pleaded dreamily a total ignorance of the whereabouts of the chalet in question. Just as, by dint of steady staring through the darkness, an indistinct form of a mattress, with a human being reclining thereon, began to be visible, another dark corner announced that this new speaker had heard of a _p't.i.t sentier_ leading to the chalet, but knew neither direction nor distance. Here the s.p.a.ce between the two corners put in a word; and, as the darkness was now becoming natural, seven or eight mattresses appeared, ranged round the room, some holding one, some two men, most of whom were sitting up on end with old caps on, displaying every variety of squalor. The voice which had spoken last declared that the distance was three-quarters of an hour, and that if the day were clear there would be no difficulty in reaching the chalet; as it was, the man would be very glad to try.

A change of cap was the only dressing necessary for the volunteer, and we faced the fog and rain, which elicited from him such a disgraceful amount of swearing, that it was on all accounts well when the rain ceased for a few minutes, the mists rolled off, and the clouds lifted sufficiently to betray the surface of the Lake of Geneva, luxuriating in the clear warmth of an early summer's day, and making us s.h.i.+ver by the painful contrast which our own alt.i.tude presented. The deep blue of the lake brought to mind the story of the shepherd of Gessenay (Saanen), of whom it is told that when he was pa.s.sing the hills with some friends for a first visit to Vevey, and came in sight of the lake, which he had never seen before, he turned and hurried home incontinent, declaring that he would not enter a country where the good G.o.d had made the blue sky to fall and fill the valleys.

In this bright interval we came upon a magnificent fox, and the peasant's impulse was, 'Oh, for a good gun!' an exclamation which would have sounded horrible to English ears, if I had not been previously broken in to it by an invitation from a Scotch gamekeeper to a fox-hunt, when he promised an excellent gun, and a _stance_ which the foxes were sure to pa.s.s.

The rain now came on again, and the guide thought he had had plenty of it, and must return for the afternoon milking; and just then, as good luck would have it, we stumbled upon an immense clump of nettles which had been one of our landmarks two days before, so that he was no longer necessary, and we said affectionate adieux.

The glaciere was in a state of ruin. Only the right-hand column, not speaking heraldically, was standing, the others lying in blocks frozen hard together on the ground. The column which still stood was much shrunken, and seemed too small for its fissure, the sides of which it scarcely touched. The wind blew down the entrance slope so determinedly, that a candle found it difficult to live at the bottom of the first cave; and a portion of the current blew into the glaciere, and in its sweep exactly struck the fallen columns, the edges of which were already rounded by thaw. Much of this must be attributed to the recent opening of the second shaft (p. 5), which admits a thorough draught through the first cave, and so exposes the glaciere to currents of warmer air; and I should expect to find that in future the ice will disappear from that part of the cave every summer, [7] whereas in 1861 we found it thick and dry (excepting a few small basins containing water) and evidently permanent, in the middle of a very hot August. The low part of the cave was so completely protected from the current, that the candle burned there quite steadily for an hour and a half: still, like the others, the column at that end of the glaciere was broken down, and it therefore became necessary to attribute its fall to some other agency than the current of external air. There had been a very large amount of rain, and the surface of the rock in the fissures was evidently wet; so I have no doubt that the filtering through of the warm rain-water had thawed the upper supports of the ice-cascades, and then, owing to their slightly inclined position, the pedestal had not provided sufficient support, and so they had fallen. One of them, perhaps, had brought down in its fall the free column, which had stood two days before on its own base, without any support from the rock. Very probably, too--indeed, almost certainly,--the fall of the large ma.s.s of rock, which once formed the bottom of the basin on the north side of the road, has affected the old-established fissures, by which rain-water has been accustomed to penetrate in small quant.i.ties to the glaciere, so that now a much larger amount is admitted. On this account, there will probably be a great diminution of the ice in the course of future summers, though the amount formed each winter may be greater than it has. .h.i.therto been. Constant examination of other columns and fissures has convinced me, that, before the end of autumn, the majority of the glacieres will have lost all the columns which depend upon the roof for a part of their support, or spring from fissures in the wall; whereas those which are true stalagmites, and are self-supporting, will have a much better chance of remaining through the warm season, and lasting till the winter, and so increasing in size from year to year. Free stalagmites, however, which are formed under fissures capable of pouring down a large amount of water on the occasion of a great flood of rain, must succ.u.mb in time, though not so soon as the supported columns.

A curious appearance was presented by a small free stalagmite in the retired part of the cave. The surface of the stalagmite was wet, from the drops proceeding from a fissure above, and was lightly covered in many parts with a calcareous deposit, brought down from the fissures in the roof by the water filtering through. The stalagmite was of the double-edged-sword shape, and the limestone deposit collected chiefly at one of its edges, the edge nearer to that part of the cave where thaw prevailed; so that the real edge was a ridge of deposit beyond the edge of the ice.[8] Patches of limestone paste lay on many parts of the ice-floor.

In the loftier part of the cave, water dropped from the roof to so large an extent, that ninety-six drops of water in a minute splashed on to a small stone immediately under the main fissure. This stone was in the centre of a considerable area of the floor which was clear of ice; and it struck me that if the columns were formed by the freezing of water dropping from the roof, there ought to have been at some time a large column under this, the most plentiful source of water in the cave. Accordingly, I found that the edge of the ice round this clear area was much thicker than the rest of the ice of the floor, and was evidently the remains of the swelling pedestal of a column which had been about 12 feet in circ.u.mference. This departed column may account for a fact which I discovered in another glaciere, and found to be of very common occurrence, viz., that in large stalagmites there is a considerable internal cavity, extending some feet up from the ground, and affording room even for a man to walk about inside the column.

When the melted snows of spring send down to the cave, through the fissures of the rock, an abundance of water at a very low temperature, and the cave itself is stored with the winter's cold, these thicker rings of ice catch first the descending water, and so a circular wall, naturally conical, is formed round the area of stones; the remaining water either running off through the interstices, or forming a floor of ice of less thickness, which yields to the next summer's drops. In the course of time, this conical wall rises, narrowing always, till a dome-like roof is at length formed, and thenceforth the column is solid. Of course, the interior cannot be wholly free from ice; and it will be seen from the account of one of these cavities, which I explored in the Schafloch, that they are decked with ice precisely as might be expected.[9] Another possible explanation of this curious and beautiful phenomenon will be given hereafter.[10]

The temperature was half a degree lower than when there were three of us in the cave two days before. I deposited one of Casella's registering thermometers, on wood, on a stone in that part of the floor which was free from ice, though there was ice all round it at some little distance. The thermometer was well above the surface of the ice, and was protected from chance drops of water from the roof.

The next morning I started early from Arzier, having an afternoon journey in prospect to the neighbourhood of another glaciere, and was accompanied by Captain Douglas Smith, of the 4th Regiment. On our way to La Genolliere, we came across the man who had served as guide the day before, and a short conversation respecting the glaciere ensued. He had only seen it once, many years before, and he held stoutly to the usual belief of the peasantry, that the ice is formed in summer, and melts in winter; a belief which everything I had then seen contradicted. His last words as we parted were, '_Plus il fait chaud, plus ca gele_;' and, paradoxical as it may appear, I believe that some truth was concealed in what he said, though not as he meant it. Considering that his ideas were confined to his cattle and their requirements, and that water is often very difficult to find in that part of the Jura, a _hot_ summer would probably mean with him a _dry_ summer, that is, a summer which does not send down much water to thaw the columns in the cave. Extra heat in the air outside, at any season, does not, as experience of these caves proves abundantly, produce very considerable disturbance of their low temperature, and so summer water is a much worse enemy than extra summer heat; and if the caves could be protected from water in the hot season, the columns in them would know how to resist the possible--but very small--increase of temperature due to the excess of heat of one summer above another. And since the eye is most struck by the appearance of the stalagmites and ice-cascades, it may well be that the peasants have seen these standing at the end of an unusually hot and dry summer, and have thence concluded that hot summers are the best time for the formation of ice. Of course, at the beginning of the winter after a hot summer, there will be on these terms a larger nucleus of ice; and so it will become true that the hotter the year, the more ice there will be, both during the summer itself and after the following winter.

The further process of the formation of ice will be this:--the colds of early winter will freeze all the water that may be in the glacieres from the summer's thaw, in such caves as do not possess a drainage, and then the frost will have nothing to occupy itself upon but the ice already formed, for no water can descend from the frost-bound surface of the earth.[11] As soon as the snow begins to melt to so great a degree that the fissures are opened up once more, the extremely cold water resulting therefrom will descend through the limestone into a cave perfectly dry, and filled with an atmosphere many degrees below the freezing point, whose frost-power eagerly lays hold of every drop of water which does not make its escape in time by the drainage of the cave. Thus the spring months will be the great time of the formation of ice, and also of the raising of the temperature from some degrees below freezing to the more temperate register at which I have generally found it, viz., rather above than below 32. Professor Tyndall very properly likens the external atmosphere to a ratchet-wheel, from its property of allowing the pa.s.sage of hot rays down to the surface of the earth, and resisting their return: it may equally be so described on other grounds, inasmuch as the cold and heavy atmosphere will sink in the winter into the pits which lead to glacieres, and will refuse to be altogether displaced in summer by anything short of solar radiation.

We found the one column of the previous day still standing, though evidently in an unhappy state of decay. The sharpness of its edges was wholly gone, and it was withered and contorted; there were two cracks completely through it, dividing it into three pieces 4 or 5 feet long, which were clearly on the point of coming down. Externally, the day was fine and warm, and so we found the cave comparatively dry, only one drop falling in a minute on to the stone where ninety-six had fallen in the same time the day before. The thermometer registered 32 as the greatest cold of the night, and still stood at that point when we took it up.

We spent some little time in exploring the neighbourhood of the pits, in order to find, if possible, the outlet for the drainage, but the ground did not fall away sufficiently for any source from so low an origin to show itself. The search was suggested by what I remembered of the Glaciere of S. Georges three years before, where the people believe that a small streamlet which issues from the bottom of a steep rock, some distance off, owes its existence to the glaciere.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: In this neighbourhood, the _montagne_ of any _commune_ is represented by the feminine form of the name of the village: thus, _L'Arziere_ is the _montagne_ of Arzier, and _La Ba.s.sine_ of Ba.s.sin.

This has a curious effect in the case of some villages--such, for instance, as S. Georges--one of the landmarks of the district between the lakes of Joux and Geneva being the _Chalet de la S. Georges_, a grammatical anomaly which puzzles a stranger descending the southernmost slope of the Jura from the Asile de Marchairuz. This law of formation is not universal; for the _montagnes_ of Rolle and S. Livres are called the _Pre de Rolle_ and the _Pre de S. Livres_, while the _Fruitiere de Nyon_ is the rich upland possession of the town of that name.]

[Footnote 2: Probably a relic of the time when the earlier Barons of Coppet possessed this district. The families of Grandson, Lesdiguieres, and Dohna successively held the barony; and in later times the t.i.tle _de Coppet_ hid a name more widely known, for on the Chalet of _Les Biolles_, some distance to the east of La Baronne, the name of _Auguste de Stael de Holstein de Coppet_ is carved, after the fas.h.i.+on of Swiss chalets. This was Madame de Stael's son, who built Biolles in 1817; it was afterwards sold to the commune of Nyon, and finally purchased by Arzier two or three years ago.]

[Footnote 3: 'Cornhill Magazine,' June 1863, 'How we slept at the Chalet des Chevres.']

[Footnote 4: This is only a guess, made from a comparison with the ascertained heights of neighbouring points.]

[Footnote 5: The patois of Vaud has a prettier name for this kind of stone--_le s.e.x_ (or _scex) qui plliau_, the weeping-stone.]

[Footnote 6: I brought one of these to England, and am told that it is the _Stenophylax hieroglyphicus_ of Stephens, or something very like that fly.]

[Footnote 7: Since writing this, I have been told that some English officers who visited the cave in the August of 1864 found no ice in any part.]