Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland
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Title: Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland
Author: G. F. Browne
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ICE-CAVES OF FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND ***
ICE-CAVES
OF
FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND.
A NARRATIVE OF
SUBTERRANEAN EXPLORATION.
BY THE
REV. G.F. BROWNE, M.A.
FELLOW AND ASSISTANT TUTOR OF ST. CATHARINE'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE;
MEMBER OF THE ALPINE CLUB.
1865.
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 latitudes and at altitudes where ice could not under
ordinary circumstances 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 _Glacières 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 glacières
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 Association 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 masses 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 circumstances, 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.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. PAGE
THE GLACIÈRE OF LA GENOLLIÈRE, IN THE JURA .............1
CHAPTER II.
THE GLACIÈRE OF S. GEORGES, IN THE JURA ................19
CHAPTER III.
THE LOWER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S. LIVRES, IN
THE JURA ...............................................32
CHAPTER IV.
THE UPPER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S. LIVRES .............46
CHAPTER V.
THE GLACIÈRE OF GRÂCE-DIEU, OR LA BAUME, NEAR BESANÇON,
IN THE VOSGIAN JURA ....................................60
CHAPTER VI.
BESANÇON AND DÔLE ......................................85
CHAPTER VII.
THE GLACIÈRE OF MONTHÉZY, IN THE VAL DE TRAVERS ........97
CHAPTER VIII.
THE GLACIÈRE AND NEIGIÈRE OF ARC-SOUS-CICON ............118
CHAPTER IX.
THE SCHAFLOCH, OR TROU-AUX-MOUTONS, NEAR THE LAKE OF
THUN ...................................................131
CHAPTER X.
THE GLACIÈRE OF GRAND ANU, NEAR ANNECY .................157
CHAPTER XI.
THE GLACIÈRE OF CHAPPET-SUR-VILLAZ, NEAR ANNECY ........182
CHAPTER XII.
THE GLACIÈRES OF THE BREZON, AND THE VALLEY
OF REPOSOIR ............................................202
CHAPTER XIII.
LA BORNA DE LA GLACE, IN THE DUCHY OF AOSTA ............210
CHAPTER XIV.
THE GLACIÈRE OF FONDEURLE, IN DAUPHINÉ .................212
CHAPTER XV.
OTHER ICE-CAVES:--
THE CAVE OF SCELICZE, IN HUNGARY .....................237
THE CAVE OF YEERMALIK, IN KOONDOOZ ...................240
THE SURTSHELLIR, IN ICELAND ..........................244
THE GYPSUM CAVE OF ILLETZKAYA ZASTCHITA, ORENBURG ....249
THE ICE-CAVERN ON THE PEAK OF TENERIFFE ..............253
CHAPTER XVI.
BRIEF NOTICES OF VARIOUS ICE-CAVES .....................256
CHAPTER XVII.
HISTORY OF THEORIES RESPECTING THE CAUSES OF
SUBTERRANEAN ICE .......................................282
CHAPTER XVIII.
ON THE PRISMATIC STRUCTURE OF THE ICE IN GLACIÈRES .....300
CHAPTER XIX.
ON THE MEAN TEMPERATURE OF THE REGIONS IN WHICH
SOME OF THE GLACIÈRES OCCUR ............................308
APPENDIX ...............................................313
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
ICE-COLUMNS IN THE GLACIÈRE OF LA GENOLLIÈRE ...........6
ENTRANCE TO THE GLACIÈRE OF S. GEORGES .................24
VERTICAL SECTIONS OF THE GLACIÈRE OF S. GEORGES ........26
LOWER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S. LIVRES .................39
SECTION OF THE LOWER GLACIÈRE OF THE
PRÉ DE S. LIVRES .......................................41
SECOND CAVE OF THE UPPER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE
S. LIVRES ..............................................50
VERTICAL SECTIONS OF THE UPPER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ
DE S. LIVRES ...........................................52
VERTICAL SECTION OF THE GLACIÈRE OF GRÂCE-DIEU, NEAR
BESANÇON ...............................................77
BATH IN THE DOUBS, AT BESANÇON .........................91
VERTICAL SECTION OF THE GLACIÈRE OF MONTHÉZY, IN THE
VAL DE TRAVERS .........................................108
GROUND PLAN OF THE GLACIÈRE OF MONTHÉZY ................110
VERTICAL SECTION OF THE GLACIÈRE OF GRAND ANU, NEAR
ANNECY .................................................173
ICE-CAVE IN THE SURTSHELLIR ............................248
* * * * *
CHAPTER I.
THE GLACIÈRE OF LA GENOLLIÈRE, 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 passes 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 _glacière_ at no great
distance, and talked of taking us to see it; but we were sceptical on
the subject, imagining that _glacière_ 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 grass 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 glacières
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 Glacière of La Genollière;
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 Genollière 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 Fruitière 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 châlets, and
we found the mountains uninhabited and still.
The point to be made for is the upper Châlet of La Genollière, called by
some of the people _La Baronne_, [2] though the district map puts La
Baronne at some distance from the site of the glacière. We had some
difficulty in finding the châlet, 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 grass, 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 Châlet des Chèvres, 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 Châlet of La Genollière, would be about two hours,
for a man walking and mounting quickly, and never losing the way; and
the glacière 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
grass, passes 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, passing 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 glacière.
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 passes 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 glacière 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 glacière, 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.
[Illustration: ICE-COLUMNS IN THE GLACIÈRE OF LA GENOLLIÈRE.]
We found four principal 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 glacière. 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 passed 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 passed 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 quantities 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
fashion 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 splashing 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 grass 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 pass 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 glacière was on Saturday, 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 Genollière, the
foreground presented was the base of the Dôle, and the chasm which
affords a passage 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 châlet; 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 châlet on La Genollière, 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
Fruitière de Nyon, and therefore the desired châlet 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 châlet, 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 glass, 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 châlet 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'tit sentier_ leading to the châlet, but knew neither direction nor
distance. Here the space 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 châlet; 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 shiver by the
painful contrast which our own altitude 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 passing 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 God 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 pass.
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 glacière 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
glacière, 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
glacière 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 glacière 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 mass 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 quantities to the glacière, 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 hitherto
been. Constant examination of other columns and fissures has convinced
me, that, before the end of autumn, the majority of the glacières 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 succumb 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 circumference. This departed column may account
for a fact which I discovered in another glacière, 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 glacière, and was
accompanied by Captain Douglas Smith, of the 4th Regiment. On our way to
La Genollière, we came across the man who had served as guide the day
before, and a short conversation respecting the glacière 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 ça gèle_;' 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 glacières 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 passage 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 glacières, 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
Glacière 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 glacière.
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'Arzière_ is the _montagne_ of Arzier, and _La Bassine_ of Bassin.
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 _Châlet 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
_Prè de Rolle_ and the _Prè de S. Livres_, while the _Fruitière 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, Lesdiguières,
and Dohna successively held the barony; and in later times the title _de
Coppet_ hid a name more widely known, for on the Châlet of _Les
Biolles_, some distance to the east of La Baronne, the name of _Auguste
de Staël de Holstein de Coppet_ is carved, after the fashion of Swiss
châlets. This was Madame de Staël'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 Châlet
des Chèvres.']
[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 sex_ (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.]
[Footnote 8: See also p. 231.]
[Footnote 9: P. 145.]
[Footnote 10: P. 301.]
[Footnote 11: It is possible that the freezing of the surface may play a
curious part in the phenomena of the spring season in such caves.
Supposing the surface to be completely frost-bound, all atmospheric
pressure will be removed from the upper surface of the water in the long
fissures, and thus water may be held in suspension, in the centre of
large masses of fissured rock, during the winter months. The first
thorough thaw will have the same effect as the removal of the thumb from
the upper orifice in the case of the hand-shower-bath; and the water
thus rained down into the cave will have a temperature sufficiently high
to destroy some portion of the cold stored up by the descent of the
heavy atmosphere of winter, or at least to melt out the ice which may
have blocked up the lower ends of the fissures.]
* * * * *
CHAPTER II.
THE GLACIÈRE OF S. GEORGES, IN THE JURA.
The best way of reaching this glacière from Geneva would be to take the
steamer to Rolle, or the train to one of the neighbouring stations,
between Geneva and Lausanne, and thence pass up the slope of the Jura by
the road which leads through Gimel. For the train, the Allaman station
would be the most convenient, as an omnibus runs from Allaman to
Aubonne, where the poste for Gimel may be caught. But from Arzier there
is a short cut of less than two hours along the side of the hills,
leaving that village by a deep gorge not unfitly named _L'Enfer_, and a
dark wood which retains an odour of more savage bygone times in its name
of the 'Bear's Wood,' as containing a cavern where an old bear was
detected in the act of attempting to winter.[12]
The village of S. Georges has very respectable accommodation for a
single traveller, _au Cavalier_. The common day-room will be found
untenable by most Englishmen, however largely they may delight in
rough quarters; but there is a double-bedded room at the end of a
bricked passage up-stairs, which serves well for bedroom and
sitting-room in one. The chief drawback in this arrangement is, that
the landlady inexorably removes all washing apparatus during the day,
holding that a pitcher and basin are unseemly ornaments for a
sitting-room. The deal table, of course, serves both for dressing and
for feeding purposes, but it is fortunately so long that an end can be
devoted to each; and on the whole it is possible to become
considerably attached to the room, with its three airy windows, and
the cool unceasing hum of a babbling fountain in the village-street
below. The Auberge is a large building, with a clock-tower of
considerable height, containing the clock of the commune: as soon as
the candle is put out at night, it becomes painfully evident that a
rectangular projection in one corner of the room is in connection with
this tower, and in fact forms a part of the abode of the pendulum,
which plods on with audible vigour, growing more and more audible as
the hours pass on, and making a stealthy pervading noise, as if a
couple of lazy ghosts were threshing phantom wheat. The clocks of
Vaud, too, are in the habit of striking the hour twice, with a short
interval; so that if anyone is not sure what the clock meant the first
time, he has a second chance of counting the strokes. This is no doubt
an admirable plan under ordinary circumstances, but it does certainly
try the patience of a sleepless dyspeptic after a surfeit of
café-au-lait and honey; and when he has counted carefully the first
time, and is bristling with the consciousness that it is only
midnight, it is aggravating in the extreme to have the long slow story
told a second time within a few feet of his head.
The Cavalier had retained a guide overnight, Henri Renaud by name, and
he appeared punctually at eight o'clock in the morning, got up in the
short-tail coat of the country, and a large green umbrella with mighty
ribs of whalebone. The weather was extremely unpleasant, a cold pitiless
rain rendering all attempts at protection unavailing; but, fortunately,
the glacière is only an hour and a quarter from the village. The path is
tolerably steep, leading across the _petit Pré de Rolle_, and through
woods of beech and fir, till the summit of one of the minor ridges of
the Jura is reached, whence a short descent leads to the mouth of the
glacière, something more than 4,000 feet above the sea. The ground here
slopes down towards the north; and on the slope, among fir-trees, an
irregular circular basin is seen, some seven or eight yards across,[13]
and perhaps two yards deep, at the bottom of which are two holes. One of
these holes is open, and as the guide and I--for my sisters remained at
Arzier--stood on the neck of ground between the holes, we could see the
snow lying at the bottom of the cave; the other is covered with trunks
of trees, laid over the mouth to prevent the rays of the sun from
striking down on to the ice. This protection has become necessary in
consequence of an incautious felling of wood in the immediate
neighbourhood of the mouth, which has exposed the ice to the assaults of
the weather. The commune has let the glacière for a term of nine years,
receiving six or seven hundred francs in all; and the _fermier_ extracts
the ice, and sells it in Geneva and Lausanne. In hot summers, the
supplies of the artificial ice-houses fail; and then the hotel-keepers
have recourse to the stores laid up for them by nature in the Glacières
of S. Georges and S. Livres. Hence the importance of protecting the
ice; the necessity for so doing arising in this case from the fact that
the entrance to the cave is by a hole in the roof, which exposes the ice
to direct radiation, unlike all other glacières, excepting perhaps the
_Cueva del Hielo_ on the Peak of Teneriffe.[14]
Autumn appears to be the usual time for cutting the ice, when it is
carried from the cave on men's backs as far as the commencement of the
rough mountain-road, and is there packed on chars, and so conveyed to
the nearest railway station. Renaud had worked in the cave for two
years, and asserted that they did not choose the night for carrying
the ice down to the station, and did not even care to choose a cool
day. He believed that, in the autumn of 1863, they loaded two chars a
day for fifteen days, and each char took from 40 to 50 quintaux; the
quintal containing 50 kilos, or 100 livres.[15] In Professor Pictet's
time (1822) this glacière supplied the Hospital of Geneva, whose
income depended in part on its privilege of _revente_ of all ice sold
in the town, with 25 quintaux every other day during the summer. In my
anxiety to learn the exact amount of ice now supplied by the glacière,
I determined to find out the _fermier_; but Renaud could tell nothing
of him beyond the fact that he lived in Geneva, which some promiscuous
person supplemented by the information that his name was Boucqueville,
and that he had something to do with comestibles. On entering upon a
hunt for M. Boucqueville a fortnight later, it turned out that no one
had heard of such a person, and the Directory professed equal
ignorance; but, under the head of 'Comestibles,' there appeared a
Gignoux-Bocquet, No. 34, Marché. Thirty-four, Marché, said, yes--M.
Bocquet--it was quite true: nevertheless, it was clear that monsieur
meant Sebastian aîné, on the Molard. The Molard knew only a younger
Sebastian, but suggested that the right man was probably M.
Gignoux-Chavaz, over the way; and when it was objected that
Gignoux-Bocquet, and not Gignoux-Chavaz, was the name, the Molard
replied that it made no matter,--Chavaz or Bocquet, it was all the
same. When M. Gignoux-Chavaz was found, he said that he certainly was
a man who had something to do with a glacière, but, instead of farming
the Glacière of S. Georges, he had only bought a considerable quantity
of ice two years ago from the Glacière of S. Livres, and he did not
believe that the _fermier_ of S. Georges lived in Geneva. Part of the
confusion was due to the custom of placing a wife's maiden name after
her husband's name: thus Gignoux-Chavaz implies that a male Gignoux
has married a female Chavaz; and when a Swiss marries an English lady
with a very English name, the result in the Continental mouth is
sufficiently curious.
On arriving at the entrance to the glacière, the end of a suggestive
ladder is seen under the protecting trunks; and after one or two steps
have been taken down the ladder, the effect of the cave below is
extremely remarkable, the main features being a long wall covered
thickly with white ice in sheets, a solid floor of darker-coloured ice,
and a high pyramid of snow reaching up towards the uncovered hole
already spoken of. The atmosphere of the cave is damp, and this causes
the ladders to fall speedily to decay, so that they are by no means to
be trusted: indeed, an early round gave way under one of my sisters,
when they visited the cave with me in 1861, and suggested a clear fall
of 60 feet on to a cascade of ice.[16] There are three ladders, one
below the other, and a hasty measurement gave their lengths as 20, 16,
and 28 feet. The rock-roof is only a few feet thick in the neighbourhood
of the hole of entrance.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE GLACIÈRE OF S. GEORGES.]
The total length of the cave is 110 feet, lying NE. and SW., in the line
of the main chain of the Jura. The lowest part of the floor is a sea of
ice of unknown depth, 45 feet long by 15 broad; and Renaud tried my
powers of belief by asserting that in 1834 the level of this floor was
higher by half the height of the cave than now; a statement, however,
which is fully borne out by Professor Pictet's measurements in 1822,
when the depth of the glacière was less than 30 feet. Indeed, the floor
had sunk considerably since my previous visit, when it was all at the
same level down to the further end of the cave; whereas now, as will be
seen in the section, there was a platform of stones resting on ice at
that end. There are two large fissures passing into the rock, one only
of which can be represented in the section, and these were full of white
ice, not owing its whiteness apparently to the admixture of air in
bubbles, but firm and compact, and very hard, almost like porcelain.
Small stalactites hung from round fissures in the roof, formed of the
same sort of ice, and broken off short, much as the end of a leaden pipe
is sometimes seen to project from a wall. With this exception, there was
no ice hanging from the roof, though there were abundant signs of very
fine columns which had already yielded to the advancing warmth: one of
these still remained, in the form of broken blocks of ice, in the
neighbourhood of the open hole in the roof, immediately below which hole
the stones of the floor were completely bare, and the thermometer stood
at 50°. At the far end of the cave, the thermometer gave something less
than 32°; a difference so remarkable, at the same horizontal level, that
I am inclined to doubt the accuracy of the figures, though they were
registered on the spot with due care. The uncovered hole, it must be
remembered, is so large, and so completely open, that the rain falls
freely on to the stones on the floor below.
By far the most striking part of this glacière is the north-west
wall, which is covered with a sheet of ice 70 feet long, and 22 feet
high at the highest part: in the neighbourhood of the ladders, this
turns the corner of the cave, and passes up for about 9 feet under the
second ladder. The general thickness of the sheet is from a foot to a
foot and a half; and this is the chief source from which the _fermier_
draws the ice, as it is much more easily quarried than the solid
floor. Some of my friends went to the cave a few weeks after my visit,
and found that the whole sheet had been pared off and carried away. On
some parts of the wall the sheet was not completely continuous, being
formed of broad and distinct cascades, connected by cross channels of
ice, and uniting at their upper and lower ends, thus presenting many
curious and ornamental groupings. On cutting through this ice, it was
found not to lie closely on the rock, a small intermediate space being
generally left, almost filled with minute limestone particles in a
very wet state; and the whole cavern showed signs of more or less
thaw.
[Illustration: THE GLACIÈRE OF S. GEORGES. VERTICAL SECTIONS OF THE
GLACIÈRE OF S. GEORGES.]
It was natural to examine the structure of the ice in this glacière,
after what we had observed on La Genollière. The same prismatic
structure was universal in the sheet on the wall, and in the blocks
which lay here and there on the floor and formed the sole remains of
former columns. It was to be observed also in many parts of the
ice-floor itself. The base of one large column still remained standing
in its original position, and its upper end presented a tolerably
accurate horizontal section of the column. The centre was composed of
turbid ice, round which limpid prisms were horizontally arranged,
diverging like the feathers of a fan; then came a ring of turbid ice,
and then a second concentric ring of limpid prisms, diverging in the
same manner as those which formed the inner ring. There were in all
three or four of these concentric rings, the details showing a
considerable amount of confusion and interference: the general law,
however, was most evident, and has held in all the similar columns which
I have since examined in other glacières. The rings were not accurately
circular, but presented rather the appearance of having been formed
round a roughly-fluted pillar on an elliptical base.
The examination of the ice on the wall gave some curious results. The
horizontal arrangement of the prisms, which we had found to prevail in
vertical columns, was here modified to suit the altered conditions of
the case, and the axes of the prisms changed their inclination so as to
be always perpendicular to the surface on which the ice lay, as far as
could be determined by the eye. Thus, in following the many changes of
inclination of the wall, the axes of the prisms stood at many different
angles with the vertical, from a horizontal position where the wall
chanced to be vertical, to a vertical position on the horizontal ledges
of the rock. The extreme edges, too, of the ice, presented a very
peculiar appearance. The general thickness, as has been said, varied
from a foot to a foot and a half; and this diminished gradually along
horizontal lines, till, at the edges of the sheet, where the ice ceased,
it became of course nothing. The extreme edge was formed of globular or
hemispherical beads of ice, like the freezing of a sweating-stone, lying
so loosely on the rock that I could sweep them off in detail with one
hand, and catch them with the other as they fell. Passing farther on
towards the thicker parts of the ice, these beads stood up higher and
higher, losing their roundness, and becoming compressed into prisms of
all shapes, in very irregular imitation of the cellular tissue in
plants, the axes of the prisms following the generally-observed law.
There seems to be nothing in this phenomenon which cannot be accounted
for by the supposition of gradual thaw of small amount being applied to
a sheet of prismatic ice.
One fact was remarkable from its universal appearance. Wherever an
incision was made in this sheet of ice, the prisms snapped off at the
depth of an inch, and could be mowed down like corn by means of a stout
knife. Although they broke naturally at this constant depth, and left a
surface of limpid ice without any signs of external or internal
division, still the laminae obtained by chiselling this lower surface
carefully, broke up regularly into the shapes to be expected in sections
of prisms cut at right angles to the axis. The roughness of my
instruments made it impossible to discover how far this extended, and
whether it ceased to be the case at any given depth in the ice.
The sea of ice on the floor was in a very wet state at the surface,
being at a lower level than the stones on to which the rain from the
open hole fell; and here the prismatic structure was not apparent to the
eye, nor do I know whether it existed at all. In the Glacière of La
Genollière I carried a large block of perfectly prismatic ice into the
outer cave, where it was exposed to the free currents of air passing
from the pit of entrance to the hole newly opened by the falling in of
the ground; and, two days after, the external lines were scarcely
perceptible, while on the occasion of our third visit I found that they
had entirely disappeared, and the whole block was rapidly following
their example. This disappearance of the surface-lines under the action
of atmospheric thaw is probably the same thing as their absence when the
flooring of ice is thinly covered with water. Wherever the flooring rose
slightly towards the edges of the sea of ice, the usual structure
appeared again.
There were no currents of air in the cave, the candles burning steadily
through the whole time of our visit. Excepting for the purpose of
detecting disturbance in the air, there is no need of candles, as the
two holes in the roof supply sufficient light. Some account of the
careful observations made here by M. Thury, at different seasons of the
year, will be found in other parts of this book. We passed, on our
return, by the source of water which springs from the foot of a rock at
some distance from the glacière, and is supposed to form the outlet for
the drainage of the cave; but it is difficult to understand how this can
be the case, considering the form and character of the intervening
ground.
The two ice-caves so far described are the least interesting of all that
I have visited; but a peasant informed me, a day or two after, that if
we had penetrated to the back of the pyramid of snow which lay half
under the open hole, being the remains of the large collection which is
formed there in the winter, we might have found a deep pit which is
sometimes exposed by the melting of the snow. He had some idea that its
depth was 30 feet a few years ago, and that its sides were solid ice. I
shall have occasion to mention such pits in another glacière; if one
does exist here, it has probably been quarried in the ice by the drops
from the hole in the roof, and there might be some interest attached to
an attempt to investigate it.[17]
We reached S. Georges again in a wretched state of wet and cold, and
Renaud went off to bed, and imbibed abundant and super-abundant
kirsch,--at least, when drawn thence the next morning, his manner left
no doubt about either the fact or the abundance of the potations
overnight. Warned by many experiences, I had gone no nearer to a
specification of the bill of fare than a vague suggestion that
_quelque chose_ must be forthcoming, with an additional stipulation
that this must be something more than mere onions and fat. The
landlady's rendering of _quelque chose_ was very agreeable, but, for
the benefit of future diners _au Cavalier_, it is as well to say that
those who do not like anisette had better make a private arrangement
with their hostess, otherwise they will swallow with their soup an
amount sufficient for many generations of the drag: they may also
safely order savoury rice, with browned veal and wine-sauce, which is
evidently a strong point with the Cavalier. All meals there are
picturesque; for the omelette lay on the Castle of Grandson and a part
of the Lake of Neufchâtel, while the butter reposed on the ruined
Cathedral of Sion, and the honey distilled pleasantly from the comb on
to the walls of Wufflens. No one should put any trust in the spoons,
which are constructed apparently of pewter shavings in a chronic state
of semi-fusion. On the evening of the second day, the landlady allowed
a second knife at tea, as the knife-of-all-work had begun to knock up
under the heavy strain upon its powers; but this supplementary
instrument was of the ornamental kind, and, like other ornamental
things, broke down at a crisis, which took the form of a piece of
crust.
Lest this account should raise anyone's expectations too high, it is as
well to add that they have no snuffers in S. Georges, beyond such as
Nature provided when she gave men fingers; and they burn attenuated
tallow candles with full-bodied wicks. Also, the tea is flavoured with
vanille, unless that precious flavouring is omitted by private contract.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 12: On our previous visit, in 1861, we passed from Arzier
through Longirod and Marchissy, stopping to measure and admire the huge
lime-tree in the churchyard of the latter village. Our Swiss companion
on that occasion was anxious that we should carry home some ice from the
cave; and as the communal law forbade the removal of the ice by
strangers, he hunted up a cousin in Marchissy, and sent him with a
_hotte_ across country, while we went innocently by the ordinary route
through S. Georges. The cousin, however, contrived to lose himself in
the woods, and we never heard of him again.]
[Footnote 13: The size of this basin is exaggerated in the engraving on
page 24, owing to the roughness of the original sketch.]
[Footnote 14: See p. 253.]
[Footnote 15: For further details on this point see pages 54 and 83.]
[Footnote 16: These ladders have at best but little stability, as they
consist of two uprights, careless about the coincidence of the holes,
with bars poked loosely through and left to fall out or stay in as they
choose, the former being the prevailing choice. One of the ladders
happened to be firmer than the generality of its kind; but,
unfortunately, its legs were of unequal lengths, and so it turned round
with one of my sisters, leaving her clinging like a cat to the under
side. When the bars are sufficiently loose, a difference of a few inches
in the lengths of the legs is not of so much importance.]
[Footnote 17: M. Thury found this hole, and fathomed it to a depth of
6-1/2 mètres.]
* * * * *
CHAPTER III.
THE LOWER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S. LIVRES.
I had intended to walk on from S. Georges to Bière, after returning from
the glacière last described, and thence, the next morning, to the Pré de
S. Livres, the mountain pasturage of the commune of S. Livres,[18] a
village near Aubonne. But Renaud advised a change of plan, and the
result showed that his advice was good. He said that the _fermier_ of
the Glacière of S. Livres generally lived in S. Georges, and, if he were
at home, would be the best guide to the glacière; while the distance
from S. Georges was, if anything, rather less than the distance from
Bière; so that by remaining at the Cavalier for another night the walk
to Bière would be saved, and the possibility of finding no competent
guide there would be evaded. Jules Mignot, the farmer in question, was
at home, and promised to go to the glacière in the morning, pledging his
word and all that he was worth for the existence and soundness of the
ladders; a matter of considerable importance, for M. Thury had been
unable to reach the ice, as also my sisters, by reason of a failure in
this respect.
In the course of the evening Mignot came in, and confidentially took the
other chair. He wished to state that he had three _associés_ in working
the glacière, and that one of them knew of a similar cave, half an hour
from the one more generally known; the _associé_ had found it two years
before, and had not seen it since, and he believed that no one else knew
where it was to be found. If I cared to visit it, the _associé_ would
accompany us, but there was some particular reason--here he relapsed
into patois--why this other man could not by himself serve as guide to
both glacières. As this meant that I must have two guides, and suggested
that perhaps the right rendering of _associé_ was 'accomplice,' the
negotiation nearly came to a violent end; but the farmer was so
extremely explanatory and convincing, that I gave him another chance,
asking him how much the two meant to have, and telling him that,
although I could not see the necessity for two guides, I only wished to
do what was right. He expressed his conviction of the truth of this
statement with such fervour, that I could only hope his moderation might
be as great as his faith. He took the usual five minutes to make up his
mind what to say, going through abstruse calculations with a brow
demonstratively bent, and, to all appearance, reckoning up exactly what
was the least it could be done for, consistently with his duty to
himself and his family. Then he asked, with an air of resignation, as if
he were throwing himself and his _associé_ away, 'Fifteen francs, then,
would monsieur consider too much?' 'Certainly, far too much; twelve
francs would be enormous. But, for the pleasure of his company and that
of his friend, I should be happy to give that sum for the two, and they
must feed themselves.' He jumped at the offer, with an alacrity which
showed that I had much under-estimated his margin in putting it at three
francs; and with many expressions of anticipatory gratitude, and
promises of axes and ropes in case of emergency, he bowed himself out.
The event proved that both the men were really valuable, and they got
something over the six francs a-piece.
The rain had been steadily increasing in intensity for the last
twenty-four hours, from the insidious steeping of a Scotch mist to the
violence of a chronic thunderstorm, and had about reached this crisis
when we started in the morning for the Pré de S. Livres. I had already
tested its effects before breakfast, in a search for the Renaud of the
day before, who had made statements regarding the ice at S. Georges, and
the time of cutting it, which a night's reflection showed to be false.
To search for Henri Renaud in the village of S. Georges, was something
like making an enquiry of a certain porter for the rooms of Mr. John
Jones. The landlady of the Cavalier was responsible for the first stage
of the journey, asserting that he lived two doors beyond the next
auberge, evidently with a feeling that it was wrong so far to patronise
the rival house as to live near it. That, however, was not the same
Henri Renaud; and a house a few yards off was recommended as a likely
place, where, instead of Henri, a Louis Renaud turned up, shivering
under the eaves in company with the _fermier_, who introduced Louis in
due form as the accomplice. They received conjointly and submissively a
lecture on the absurdity of calling it a rainy morning, and the
impossibility of staying at home, even if it came on much worse, and
then pointed the way to the true Henri Renaud, half-way down the
village. When I arrived at the place indicated, and consulted a
promiscuous Swiss as to the abode of the object of my search, he
exclaimed, 'Henri Renaud? I am he.' 'But,' it was objected, 'it is the
_marchand de bois_ who is wanted.' 'Precisely, Henri Renaud, marchand de
bois; it is I.' 'But, it is the cutter of ice in the glacière.' 'Ah, a
different Henri. That Henri is in bed in the house yonder,' and so at
last he was found. When finally unearthed, Henri confessed that when he
had said _spring_ the day before, he ought to have said _autumn_, and
that by autumn he meant November and December. Enquiries elsewhere
showed that the end of summer was what he really meant, if he meant to
tell the truth.
Our route for the glacière followed the high road which leads by the
Asile de Marchairuz to La Vallée, as far as the well-known Châlet de la
S. Georges; and then the character of the way changed rapidly for the
worse, and we took to the wet woods. After a time, the wood ceased for a
while, and a large expanse of smooth rock showed itself, rising slightly
from the horizontal, and so slippery in its present wet condition that
we could not pass up it. Then woods again, and then the montagnes of
_Sous la Roche_, and _La Foireuse_, till at last, in two hours, the Pré
de S. Livres was achieved. The fog was so dense that nothing could be
seen of the general lie of the country; but the _thalweg_ was a
sufficient guide, and after due perseverance we came upon the glacière,
not many yards from that line, on the north slope of the open valley,
about 4,500 feet above the sea.
To prevent cattle from falling into the pit, a wall has been built round
the trees in which it lies. The circumference of this wall is 435 feet,
but there are so many trees at the upper end of the enclosure that this
gives an exaggerated idea of the size of the pit. The men fed while the
preliminary measurements were being made; and when this was
accomplished, they pressed their bottle of wine upon me so hospitably
that I was obliged to antedate the result which its appearance promised,
and plead _mal d'estomac_. Of all things, it is most unwise to give a
reason for a negative, and so it proved in this instance; for they
promptly felicitated themselves and me on the good luck by which it
happened that they had brought a wine famous on all the côte as a remedy
for that somewhat vague complaint--a homoeopathic remedy in allopathic
doses.
The glacière is entered by a natural pit in the gentle slope of grass,
not much unlike the pit of La Genollière, but wider, and covered at
the bottom with snow.[19] The first ladder leads down to a ledge of
rock on which bushes and trees grow, and this ledge it is possible to
reach without a ladder; the next ladder leads on to the deep snow, and
descent by any ordinary manner of climbing is in this case quite
impossible.[20] The snow slopes down towards a lofty arch in the rock
which forms the north-west side of the pit, and this arch is the
entrance to the glacière; it is 28-3/4 feet wide, and as soon as we
passed under it we found that the snow became ice, and it was
necessary to cut steps; for the surface of underground ice is so
slippery, unlike the surface of ordinary glaciers, that the slightest
defect from the horizontal makes the use of the axe advisable. The
stream of ice falls gradually, spreading out laterally like a fan, so
as to accommodate itself to the shape of the cave, which it fills up
to the side walls; it increases in breadth from 28-3/4 feet at the top
to 72 feet at the bottom of the slope, and the distance from the top
of the first ladder to this point is 177 feet. Here we were arrested
by a strange wall of ice 22 feet high, down which there seemed at
first no means of passing; but finding an old ladder frozen into a
part of the wall, we chopped out holes between the upper steps, and so
descended, landing on a flooring composed of broken blocks and columns
of ice, with a certain amount of what seemed to be drifted snow. This
wall of ice, which was 72 feet long and 22 feet high, was not
vertical, but sloped the wrong way, caving in under the stream of ice;
and from the projecting top of the wall a long fringe of vast icicles
hung down, along the whole breadth of the fan. The effect of this was,
that we could walk between the ice-wall and the icicles as in a
cloister, with solid ice on the one hand and Gothic arcades of ice on
the other, the floor being likewise of ice, and the roof formed by the
junction of the wall with the top of the icicle-arcade. The floor of
this cloister was not 22 feet below the top of the wall, for it formed
the upper part of a gentle descending slope of ice, rounded off like a
fall of water, which seemed to flow from the lower part of the wall;
and the height of 22 feet is reckoned from the foot of this slope,
which terminated at a few feet of horizontal distance from the foot of
the wall. The wall of ice was plainly marked with horizontal bands,
corresponding, no doubt, to a number of years of successive deposits;
sometimes a few leaves, but more generally a strip of minuter débris,
signified the divisions between the annual layers. There had been many
columns of ice from fissures in the rock, but all had fallen except
one large ice-cascade, which flowed from a hole in the side of the
cave on to the main stream, about two-thirds of the distance down from
the snow. One particularly grand column had stood on the very edge of
the ice-wall, and its remains now lay below.
The flooring of mingled ice and snow, on which we stood, sloped through
about five vertical feet from the foot of the wall, and came to an end
on broken rocks, from which the terminal wall of the cave sprang up. The
effect of the view from this point, as we looked up the long slope of
ice to where the ladders and a small piece of sky were visible, was most
striking. The accompanying engraving is from a sketch which attempts to
represent it; the reality is much less prim, and much more full of
beautiful detail, but still the engraving gives a fair idea of the
general appearance of the cave.
While I was occupied in making sketches and measurements, Mignot was
engaged in chopping discontentedly at the floor, in two or three
different places. At length he seemed to find a place to his mind, and
chopped perseveringly till his axe went through, and then he suggested
that we should follow. The hole was not tempting. It opened into the
blackest possible darkness, and Mignot thrust his legs through,
feeling for a foothold, which, by lowering himself almost to his
armpits, he soon discovered: the foothold, however, proved to be a
loose stone, which gave way under him and bounded down, apparently
over an incline of like stones, to a distance which sounded very
alarming. But he would not give in, and at length, descending still
further by means of the snow in which the hole was made, he was
rewarded by finding a solid block which bore his weight, and he
speedily disappeared altogether, summoning me to follow. I proposed to
light a candle first, not caring to go through such a hole, in such a
floor, into no one knew what; but he was so very peremptory, evidently
thinking that if he had gone through without a pioneering candle his
monsieur might do the same, that there was nothing for it but to obey.
The hole was very near the junction of the floor with the slope of
stones where the floor terminated, and the space between the hole and
the slope seemed to be filled up with a confused mass of snow and ice,
in which the snow largely predominated; so that there was good hold
for hands and feet in passing down to the stones, which might be about
7 feet below the upper surface of the floor. Here we crouched in the
darkness, with our faces turned away from the presumed slope of
stones, till a light was struck. The accomplice did not find it in the
bond that he should go down, and he preferred to reserve his energies
for his own peculiar glacière.
[Illustration: LOWER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S. LIVRES.]
As soon as the candle had mastered a portion of the darkness, we found
that we were squatting on a steeply sloping descent of large blocks of
stone, while in face of us was a magnificent wall of ice, evidently the
continuation of the wall above, marked most plainly with horizontal
lines. This wall passed down vertically to join the slope on which we
were, at a depth below our feet which the light of the candle had not
yet fathomed. The horizontal bands were so clear, that, if we had
possessed climbing apparatus, we could have counted the number of layers
with accuracy. Of course we scrambled down the stones, and found after a
time that the angle formed by the ice-wall and the slope of stones was
choked up at the bottom by large pieces of rock, one piled on another
just as they had fallen from the higher parts. These blocks were so
large, that we were able to get down among the interstices, in a spiral
manner, for some little distance; and when we were finally stopped,
still the ice-wall passed on below our feet, and there was no possible
chance of determining to what depth it went. The atmosphere at this
point was a sort of frozen vapour, most unpleasant in all respects, and
the candles burned very dimly. The thermometer stood at 32°, half-way
down the slope of stones.
We were able to stretch a string in a straight line from the lowest
point we reached, through the interstices of the blocks of stone, and
up to the entrance-hole, and this measurement gave 50 feet.
Considering the inclination of the upper ice-floor, and the sharpness
of the angle between the wall of ice and the line of our descent to
this lowest point, I believe that 50 feet will fairly represent the
height of the ice-wall from this point to the foot of the slope from
the upper wall; so that 72 feet will be the whole depth of ice, from
the top of the third ladder to the point where our further progress
downwards was arrested. The correctness of this calculation depends
upon the honesty of Mignot, who had charge of the farther end of the
string, and was proud of the wonders of his cave. A dishonest man
might easily, under the circumstances, have pulled up a few feet more
of string than was necessary, but 50 feet seemed in no way an
improbable result of the measurement.
[Illustration: SECTION OF THE LOWER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S. LIVRES.]
The ice was as solid and firm as can well be conceived. The horizontal
bands would seem to prove conclusively that it was no coating of greater
or less thickness on the face of a vertical wall of rock, an idea which
might suggest itself to anyone who had not seen it, and I think it
probable that the amount of ice represented in the section of the cave
is not an exaggeration. We were unable to measure the whole length of
the wall in the lower cave, from the large number of blocks of stone
which had fallen at one end, and lay against its face. Probably, from
the nature of the case, it was not so long as the 72 feet of wall above;
but we measured 50 feet, and could see it still passing on to the right
hand as we faced it. In trying to penetrate farther along the face, I
found a wing of the brown fly we had seen in considerable abundance on
the ice in La Genollière, frozen into the remains of a column.
There was so very much to be observed on all sides, and the measurements
took up so much time, owing to the peculiar difficulties which attended
them, that I did not examine with sufficient care the curious floor of
ice through which we cut our way to the lower cavern. Neither did I
notice the roof of the cavern thus reached, which may be very different
from the shape of the upper surface of the floor composing it. If the
ice-wall goes straight up, and the roof is formed of the ice-floor
alone, then it is a very remarkable feature indeed. But, more probably,
the lower wall leans over more and more towards the top, and so forms as
it were a part of the roof. It is possible that, as the wall has grown,
each successive annual layer has projected farther and farther, till at
last some year very favourable to the increase of ice has carried the
projection for that year nearly to the opposite stones, and then an
unfavourable year or two would form the foot of the upper wall. This
seems more probable, from the loose constitution of the floor at the
point where it joins the stones, as if it were there only made up of
drift and débris, while the part of the floor nearer the foot of the
wall is solid ice. It has been suggested to me that possibly water
accumulates in the time of greatest thaw to a very large extent in the
lower parts of the cave, and the ice-floor is formed where the frost
first takes hold of this water. But the slope of the ice-floor is
against this theory, to a certain extent; and the amount of water
necessary to fill the cavity would be so enormous, that it is contrary
to all experience to imagine such a collection, especially as the cave
showed no signs of present thaw. The appearance of the rocks, too, in
the lower cave, and the surface of the ice-wall there, gave no
indications of the action of water; and there was no trace of ice among
the stones, as there certainly would have been if water had filled the
cave, and gradually retired before the attacks of frost, or in
consequence of the opening up of drainage. There were pieces of the
trunks of trees, also, and large bones, lying about at different levels
on the rocks. I never searched for bones in these caves, owing to the
absence of the stalagmitic covering which preserves cavern-bones from
decay; nor did I take any notice of such as presented themselves without
search, for the _bergers_ are in the habit of throwing the carcases of
deceased cows into any deep hole in the neighbourhood of the place where
the carcases may be found, in consequence of the general belief that
living cows go mad if they find the grave of a companion; so that I
should probably have made a laborious collection of the bones of the
_bos domesticus_. This belief of the bergers respecting the cows is
supported by several circumstantial and apparently trustworthy accounts
of fearful fights among herds of cattle over the grave of some of the
herd. The sight of a companion's blood is said to have a similar effect
upon them. Thus a small pasturage between Anzeindaz and the Col de
Cheville, on the border of the cantons Vaud and Valais, is still called
_Boulaire_ from legendary times, when the herdsmen of Vaud (then Berne)
won back from certain Valaisan thieves the cattle the latter were
carrying off from La Varraz. Some of the cows were wounded in the
battle, and the sight of their blood drove the others mad, so that they
fought till almost all the herd was destroyed; whence the name
Boulaire, from _ébouëler_, to disembowel,--a word formed from _bouë_,
the patois for _boyau_.
When we left the lower darkness and ascended to the floor of ice once
more, Mignot expressed a desire to see my attempt at a sketch of the
glacière from that point, as he had been much struck during his
negotiatory visit of the night before by the sketch of the entrance to
the Glacière of S. Georges, chiefly because he had guessed what it was
meant for. He was evidently disappointed with the representation of his
own cave, for he could see nothing but a network of lines, with
unintelligible words written here and there, and after some hesitation
he confessed that it was not the least like it. A little explanation
soon set that right, and then he began to plead vigorously for the wall
which surrounded the trees at the mouth of the pit. Why was it not put
in? He was told, because it could not be seen from below; but
nevertheless he strongly urged its introduction, on the ground that he
had built it himself, and it was such a well-built wall; facts which far
more than balanced any little impossibility that might otherwise have
prevented its appearance. After we had reached the grass of the outer
world again, he made me sketch the entrance to the pit, pointing to the
containing wall with parental pride, and standing over the sketch-book
and the sketcher with an umbrella which speedily turned inside out
under the combined pressure of wind, and rain, and years; a feat which
it had already performed _des fois_, he said, in the course of his
acquaintance with it.
Before finally leaving the glacière, I examined the structure of the
great stream of ice, at different points near the top of the limiting
wall. From its outward appearance it might have been expected to be
rough, but it was not so; it was knotty to the eye, but perfectly smooth
to the foot, and, when cut, showed itself perfectly clear and limpid. It
did not separate under the axe into misshapen pieces, with faces of
every possible variation from regularity, that is, with what is called
vitreous fracture, but rather separated into a number of nuts of limpid
ice, each being of a prismatic form, and of much regularity in shape and
size. It was smooth, dark-grey, and clear; free from air, and free from
surface lines; very hard, and suggesting the idea of coarse internal
granulation. In the large ice-streams of some darker glacières, this ice
assumed a rather lighter colour by candle-light, but always presented
the same granular appearance, and cut up into the same prismatic nuts,
and was evidently free from constitutional opacity.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 18: _Sancti Liberii locus_, the Swiss Dryasdust explains.
There is nothing to connect any known S. Liberius with this
neighbourhood, unless it be the Armenian prince who secretly left his
father's court for Jerusalem, and was sought for throughout Burgundy and
other countries. It seems that Saint Oliver is merely a corruption of S.
Liberius, the Italian form of the latter, Santo Liverio, having become
Sant-Oliverio, as S. Otho became in another country Sant Odo, and thence
San Todo, thus creating a new Saint, S. Todus.--Act SS. May 27.]
[Footnote 19: My sisters made a two-days' excursion from Arzier to this
glacière in the autumn of 1862, and found no snow in the bottom of the
pit. They took the route by Gimel to Bière, intending to defer the visit
to the glacière to the morning of the second day; but being warned by
the appearance known locally as _le sappeur qui fume_, a vaporous cloud
at the mouth of a cavern near the Dent d'Oche, on the other side of the
Lake of Geneva, they caught the communal forester at once, and put
themselves under his guidance. The distance from Bière is two hours'
good walking, and an hour and a half for the return. There was no ladder
for the final descent, and the neighbouring châlet could provide nothing
longer than 15 feet, the drop being 30 feet. Two Frenchmen had attempted
to make their way to the cave a week before; but the old 30-foot ladder
of the previous year broke under the foremost of them, and he fell into
the pit, whence he was drawn up by means of a cord composed of
rack-ropes from the châlet, tied together. However useful a string of
cow-ties may be for rescuing a man from such a situation, A. and M. did
not care to make use of that apparatus for a voluntary descent, so they
were perforce contented with a distant view of the ice from the lower
edge of the pit.]
[Footnote 20: See the section of this cave and pit on page 41.]
* * * * *
CHAPTER IV.
THE UPPER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S. LIVRES.
We now put ourselves under the guidance of the accomplice, Louis, who
began to express doubts of his ability to find the upper glacière,
administering consolation by reminding us that if he could not find it
no one else could.
As we walked on through the mist and rain, it became necessary to
circumvent a fierce-looking bull, and Mignot and the accomplice told
rival tales of the dangers to which pedestrians are exposed from the
violence of the cattle on some montagnes, where the bulls are allowed
to grow to full size and fierceness. Mignot was quite motherly in his
advice and his cautions, recommending as the surest safeguard a
pocket-pistol, loaded with powder only, to be flashed in the bull's
face as he makes his charge. When informed that in England an umbrella
or a parasol is found to answer this purpose, he shook his head
negatively, evidently having no confidence in his own umbrella, and
doubting its obeying his wishes at the critical moment; indeed, it
would require a considerable time, and much care and labour, to unfurl
a lumbering instrument of that description. He had the best of the
tale-contest with Renaud in the end, for he had himself been grazed by
a bull which came up with him at the moment when he sprang into a
tree.
Before very long we reached a little kennel-like hut of boughs, which no
decent dog would have lived in, and no large dog could have entered, and
from this we drew a charcoal-burner. No, he said, he did not know the
glacière; he had heard that one had been discovered near there, and he
had spent hours in searching for it without success. A herdsman on his
way from one pasturage to another could give no better help, and we
began to despair, till at length Louis desired us to halt in a place
sheltered from the rain, while he prosecuted the search alone. We had
abundant time for observing that, like other leafy places sheltered from
the rain, our resting-place was commanded by huge and frequent drops of
water; but at last a joyful _Jodel_ announced the success of the
accomplice, and we ran off to join him.
At first sight there was very little to see. Louis had lately been
enunciating an opinion that the cave was not worth visiting, and I now
felt inclined to agree with him. The general plan appeared to be much
the same as in the one we had just left, but the scale was
considerably smaller. The pit was not nearly so deep or so large, and,
owing to the falling-in of rock and earth at one side, the snow was
approached by a winding path with a gradual fall. As soon as the snow
was reached, the slope became very steep, and led promptly to an arch
in the rock, where the stream of ice began. The cave being shallow,
the stream soon came to an end, and, unlike that in the lower
glacière, it filled the cave down to the terminal wall, and did not
fill it up to the left wall. Here the ground of the cave was visible,
strewn with the remains of columns, and showing the thickness of the
bottom of the stream to be about 6 feet only. The arch of entrance had
evidently been almost closed by a succession of large columns, but
these had succumbed to the rain and heat to which they had been
exposed by their position.
The left side of the cave, in descending, that is the west side, was
comparatively light, being in the line from the arch; but the other side
was quite dark, and after a time we found that the ice-stream, instead
of terminating as we had supposed with the wall of rock at the end of
the cavern, turned off to the right, and was lost in the darkness. Of
course candles were brought out, though Louis assured us that he had
explored this part of the cave on his previous visit, and had found that
the right wall of the cave very soon stopped the stream: we, on the
contrary, by tying a candle to a long stick, and thrusting it down the
slope of ice, found that the stream passed down extremely steeply, and
poured under a narrow and low arch in the wall of the cave, beyond
which nothing could be seen. We despatched pieces of ice along the
slope, and could hear them whizzing on after they had passed the arch,
and landing apparently on stones far below; so I called for the cords,
and told Louis that we must cut our way down. But, alas! the cords had
been left at the other glacière! One long bag, with a hole in the middle
like an old-fashioned purse, had carried the luncheon at one end and the
ropes at the other; and when the luncheon was finished, the bag had been
stowed away under safe trees till our return. This was of course
immensely annoying, and I rang the changes on the few words of abuse
which invention or knowledge supplied, as we sat damp and shivering on
the verge of the slope, idly sending down pieces of broken columns which
brought forth tantalising sounds from the subterranean regions. At
length Renaud was moved to shame, and declared that he would cut his way
down, rope or no rope; but this seemed so horribly hazardous a
proceeding under all the circumstances, that I forbad his attempting it.
Seeing, however, that he was determined to do something, we arranged
ourselves into an apparatus something like a sliding telescope. Louis
cut a first step down the slope, and there took his stand till such time
as Mignot got a firm grasp of the tail of his blouse with both hands, I
meanwhile holding Mignot's tail with one hand, and the long stick with
the candle attached to it with the other; thus professedly supporting
the whole apparatus, and giving the necessary light for the work. Even
so, we tried again to persuade Renaud to give it up, but he was warmed
to his work, and really the arrangement answered remarkably well: when
he wished to descend to a new step, Mignot let out a little blouse, and,
being himself similarly relieved, descended likewise a step, and then
the remaining link of the chain followed. The leader slipped once, but
fortunately grasped a projecting piece of rock, for the stream was here
confined within narrow walls, and so the strength of the apparatus was
not tested; it could scarcely have stood any serious call upon its
powers.
After a considerable period of very slow progress, Renaud asked for the
candlestick, never more literally a stick than now, and thrust it under
the arch, stooping down so as to see what the farther darkness might
contain. We above could see nothing, but, after an anxious pause, he
cried _On peut aller!_ with a lively satisfaction so completely shared
by Mignot, that that worthy person was on the point of letting Renaud's
blouse go, in order to indulge in gestures of delight. The step-cutting
went on merrily after this announcement, and one by one we came to the
arch and passed through, finding it rather a trough than an arch; the
breadth was about 4 feet, and the height from 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 feet, and,
as we pushed through, our breasts were pressed on to the ice, while our
backs scraped against the rock which formed the roof.
[Illustration: SECOND CAVE OF THE UPPER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S.
LIVRES.]
As soon as this trough was passed, the ice spread out like a fan, and
finally landed us in a subterranean cavern, 72 feet long by 36 feet broad,
to which this was the only entrance. The breadth of the fan at the
bottom was 27 feet; and near the archway a very striking column poured
from a vertical fissure in the wall, and joined the main stream. The
fissure was partially open to the cave, and showed the solid round
column within the rock: this column measured 18-1/2 feet in
circumference, a little below the point where it became free of the
fissure, and it had a stream of ice 22 feet long pouring from its base.
The colour of the column was unusual, being a dull yellowish green, and
the peculiar structure of the ice gave the whole mass the appearance of
coursing down very rapidly, as if the water had been frozen while thus
moving, and had not therefore ceased so to move. At the bottom of the
fan, the flooring of the cave consisted of broken stones for a small
space, and then came a black lake of ice, which occupied all the centre
of the cave, and afforded us no opportunity of even guessing at its
depth. From the manner, however, in which it blended with the stones at
its edge, I am not inclined to believe that this depth was anything very
great.
Renaud, in his impetuosity, had ceased to cut steps towards the bottom
of the slope, and had slipped down the last few feet, of course cutting
the remaining steps before attempting to reascend. We found him
strutting about the floor of the cave, tossing his wet cap in the air,
and crying _No one! No one! I the first!_, declining to take any part in
measurements until the full of his delight and pride had been poured
out. He shouted so loud that I was obliged to stop him, lest by some
chance the unwonted disturbance of the air should bring down an unstable
block from the roof of the arch, and seal us up for ever. There was no
sign of incipient thaw in the cave, and the air was very dry, so much so
as at once to call attention to the fact. At the farthest end, a lofty
dome opened up in the roof; and possibly at some time or other the rock
may here fall through, and afford another means of entrance. Beneath
this dome a very lovely cluster of columns had grouped itself, formed of
the clear porcelain-like ice, and fretted and festooned with the utmost
delicacy, as if Andersen's Ice Maiden had been there in one of her
amiable moods, and had built herself a palace. This dome in the roof was
similar to many which I afterwards observed in other glacières, being a
vertical fissure with flutings from top to bottom--not a spherical dome,
but of that more elegant shape which the female dress of modern times
assumes on a tall person.
[Illustration: VERTICAL SECTIONS OF THE UPPER GLACIÈRE OF THE PRÉ DE S.
LIVRES. [21]]
Between the base of the circular column and the wall, we found a rare
instance of clear jelly-like ice, without any lines external or
internal, such as is formed in the open air under very favourable
circumstances. The ordinary number of undergraduate May Terms had
afforded various opportunities for studying the comparative clearness of
different pieces of ice, but certainly no one ever saw a lemon pippin
through an inch and a half of that material so clearly as we now saw the
white rock through 1-1/2 feet. Mignot, indeed, said 2 feet; but it was
his way to make a large estimate of dimensions, and he constantly
interrupted my record of measurements by the assertion that I had made
them _moins que plus_. We were all disappointed by the actual size of
the ice-fall which it had cost us so much time and trouble to descend,
the distance from the first step to the last being only 26 feet: as
this, however, was given by a string stretched from the one point to the
other, and not following the concave surface of the ice, the real
distance was something more than this.
It was now getting rather late, considering the journey one of us had
yet to perform, and we walked quickly away from the glacière, agreeing
that it was not improbable that in that part of the Jura there might be
many hidden caves containing more or less ice, with no entrance from the
world outside, except the fissures which afford a way for the water. The
entrance to this cave was so small, that the same physical effect might
well be produced by one or two cracks in the rock, such as every one is
well acquainted with who has walked on the fissured limestone summits
of the lower mountains; and, indeed, Renaud positively affirmed that at
the time of his former visit there was not even this entrance to the
lower cave, for the ice-stream reached then a higher point of the wall,
and completely filled and hid the arch we had discovered. It is very
difficult to see how ice can exist in a cave which has no atmospheric
communication with the colds of winter, as would apparently be the case
with this cave if the one entrance were closed; but where the cracks and
small fissures in the rock do provide such communication, there is no
reason why we should not imagine all manner of glacial beauties
decorating unknown cavities, beyond the general physical law to which
all the glacières would seem to be exceptions.
Mignot now became communicative as to the amount of ice supplied by his
glacière, the lower of the two we had seen; and his statistics were so
utterly confused, that I gave him ten centimes and an address, and
charged him to write it all down from his account-book, and send it by
post. The letter was accordingly written on July 24, and after trying
many unsuccessful addresses in various parts of Switzerland, it finally
reached England in the middle of September. It tells its own tale
sufficiently well, and is therefore given here with all the mistakes of
the original.
'Mon cher Monsieur Browne,--J'ai beaucoup tardé a vous écrire les
détails promis, sans doute je ne voulait pas vous oublier; nous sommes
affligés dans nôtre maison ma femme et gravement malade ce qui me donne
beaucoup de tourment jour et nuit, enfin ce n'est pas ce qui doit faire
nôtre entretient.
En 1863. Nous avons exploité comme suit. (Dépenses.)
Aoust 27 10 journées pour confectionner les Echelles et les poser.
" 29 3 journées pour couper la glasse.
" 31 11 journées pour sortir la glasse avec les hôtes.
" 31 4 chars a deux chevaux pour ammener
Menés la charge a deux: dès St. Georges a
Septembre 1 Gland plusieurs autres journées pour accompagner
les chars. 70 pots de vin bu
en faisant ces chargements, pour trois
cordes pour se tenir.
Septembre 2 Trois journées pour couper.
le 3 12 journées pour sortir.
'Cher Monsieur.--Je ne vous ait pas mis le prix de chaque articles; ni
tout-a fait tous les traveaux mais pour vous donner une idée, je veux
vous donner connaissance du coût général des dépences pour deux
chargements s'élève a 535 francs. Je vous donne aussi connaissance de la
quantité de glasse rendue 235 quinteaux a 3 francs, qui produit 705
francs reste net sur ces deux chargements 175 francs: par conséquent mon
cher Monsieur je n'ai pas besoin de vous donner des détails des
chargements suivants c'est a peu près les mêmes frais, et la quantité de
glasse aussi.
'Nous en avons refait trois chargements:--
Un le 15 Septembre.
2 le 13 Octobre.
3 le 14 Novembre.
'Cela comprend toute l'exploitation de 1863.
'Vous m'excuserez beaucoup de mon retard.
'Je termine en vous présentant mes respectueuses salutations. Vous
noublierez pas ce que vous mavez promis'[22]St. Georges, le 24 Juillet,
1864. _Dimanche_.
'JULES MIGNOT.'
Instead of three francs the quintal, Mignot had previously told me that
he got four francs, delivered at Gland, and five at Geneva. His ordinary
staff during the time of the exploitation was ten men to carry and load,
and two to cut the ice in the cave.
It was a matter of considerable importance to catch the Poste at
Gimel, and the two Swiss groaned loudly on the consequent pace,
unnecessary, as far as they were concerned, for the Poste was nothing
to them. As a general rule, the Swiss of this district cannot walk so
fast as their Burgundian or French neighbours, unless it is very much
to their interest to do so, and then they can go fast enough. A legend
is still preserved in the valleys of Joux and Les Rousses, to the
following effect. While the Franche Comté was still Spanish, in 1648,
commissioners were appointed to fix the boundaries between Berne and
Burgundy, on the other side of the range of hill we were now
descending, and they decided that one of the boundary stones must be
placed at the distance of a common league from the Lake of Les
Rousses. Unfortunately, no one could say what a common league was,
beyond the vague definition of 'an hour's walk;' so two men were
started from the shore of the lake, the one a Burgundian and the other
a Swiss, with directions to walk for an hour down the Orbe towards
Chenit, the stone to be placed half-way between the points they should
respectively reach at the end of the hour. It was for the interest of
the Franche Comté that the stone should be as near the lake as
possible, and accordingly the Swiss champion made such walking as had
never been seen before, and gained for Berne a considerable amount of
territory. There was no such tragic result in this case as that which
induced the Carthaginians to pay divine honours to the brothers whose
speed, on a like occasion, had added an appreciable amount to the
possessions of the republic.
At length we reached the point where the roads for Gimel and S.
Georges separate, and there, under a glorious sapin, we said our
adieux, and wished our _au revoirs_, and settled those little matters
which the best friends must settle, when one is of the nature of a
monsieur, and the others are guides. They burdened their souls with
many politenesses, and so we parted. The inclemency of the weather was
such, that the people in the lower country asked, as they passed,
whether snow had fallen in the mountains, and the cold rain continued
unceasingly down to the large plain on which the Federal Camp of
Bière[23] is placed. Here for a few moments the sun showed itself,
lighting up the white tents, and displaying to great advantage the
masses of scented orchises, and the feathery _reine-des-prés_, which
hemmed the road in on either side. All through the earlier part of the
day, flowers had forced themselves upon our notice as mere vehicles
for collected rain, when we came in contact with them; but now, for a
short time, they resumed their proper place,--only for a short time,
for the rain soon returned, and did not cease till midnight. Not all
the garden scenery about Aubonne and Allaman (_ad Lemannum_), nor all
the vineyards which yield the choice white wine of the Côte, could
counterbalance the united discomfort of the rain, and the cold which
had got into the system in the two glacières; and matters were not
mended by the discovery that _Bradshaw_ was treacherous, and that a
junction with dry baggage at Neufchâtel could not be effected before
eleven at night.
There are some curious natural phenomena in this neighbourhood, due to
the subterranean courses which the fissured limestone of the Jura
affords to the meteoric waters. Not far from Bière, the river Aubonne
springs out at the bottom of an amphitheatre of rock, receiving
additions soon after from a group of twenty natural pits, which the
peasants call unfathomable--an epithet freely applied to the strange
holes found in the Jura. It is remarkable that the way seems to stand
at different levels in the various pits.[24] The plain of Champagne,
in which they occur, is unlike the surrounding soil in being formed of
calcareous detritus, evidently brought down by some means or other
from the Jura, and is dry and parched up to the very edges of the
pits. The Toleure, a tributary of the Aubonne, frequently large enough
to be called a confluent, flows out from the foot of a wall of rock
composed of regular parallelopipeds, and in the spring, when the snows
are melting freely, its sources burst out at various levels of the
rock. Farther to the west, the Versoie, famous for its trout, pours
forth a full-sized stream near the Château of Divonne, which is said
to take its name (_Divorum unda_) from this phenomenon. Passing to the
northern slope of this range of the Jura, the Orbe is a remarkable
example of the same sort of thing, flowing out peacefully in very
considerable bulk from an arch at the bottom of a perpendicular rock
of great height. This river no doubt owes its origin to the
superfluous waters of the Lake of Brenets, which have no visible
outlet, and sink into fissures and _entonnoirs_ in the rock at the
edge of the lake. Notwithstanding that the lake is three-quarters of a
league distant, horizontally, and nearly 700 feet higher, the belief
had always been that it was the source of the stream, and in 1776 this
was proved to be the fact. For some years before that date, the waters
of the Lake of Joux had been inconveniently high, and the people
determined to clean out the _entonnoirs_ and fissures of the Lake of
Brenets, which is only separated from the Lake of Joux by a narrow
tongue of land, in the expectation that the water would then pass away
more freely. In order to reach the fissures, they dammed up the outlet
of the upper into the lower lake; but the pressure on the embankment
became too great, and the waters burst through with much violence,
creating an immense disturbance in the lake; and the Orbe, which had
always been perfectly clear, was troubled and muddy for some little
time. The source of the Loue, near Pontarlier, is more striking than
even that of the Orbe.[25]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 21: A point common to the two sections, which are made by
planes nearly at right angles to each other.]
[Footnote 22: The dimensions of the two caves, and of the various masses
of ice.]
[Footnote 23: The Cartulary of Lausanne states that the wealthy village
of Bière received its name from the following historical fact:--In 522,
the Bishop of Lausanne, S. Prothais, was superintending the cutting of
wood in the Jura for his cathedral, when he died suddenly, and was
carried down on a litter to a place where a proper _bier_ could he
procured, whence the place was named Bière.]
[Footnote 24: The most curious pit of this kind is the _frais-puits_ of
Vesoul, in the Vosgian Jura, which pours forth immense quantities of
water after rain has fallen in the neighbourhood. The water rushes out
in the shape of a fountain, and on one occasion, in November 1557, saved
the town of Vesoul from pillage by a passing army. This pit is carefully
described by M. Hassenfratz, in the _Journal de Physique_, t. xx. p. 259
(an. 1782), where he says that Cæsar was driven away from the town of
Vesoul, which he had intended to besiege, by the floods of water poured
forth from the _frais-puits_. I know of no such incident in Cæsar's
life, though M. Hassenfratz quotes Cæsar's own words: the town of
Vesoul, too, had no historical existence before the 9th or 10th century
of our era. There is also a pit near Vesoul which contains icicles in
summer, and may be the same as the _frais-puits_, for the old historian
of Franche Comté, Gollut, in describing the latter, mentions that it is
so cold that no one cares to explore it (pp. 91. 92).]
[Footnote 25: See p. 122.]
* * * * *
CHAPTER V.
THE GLACIÈRE OF THE GRÂCE-DIEU, OR LA BAUME, NEAR BESANÇON.
The grand and lovely scenery of the Val de Travers has at length been
opened up for the ordinary tourist world, by the railway which connects
Pontarlier with Neufchâtel. The beauties of the valley are an
unfortunate preparation for the dull expanse of ugly France which greets
the traveller passing north from the former town; but the country soon
assumes a pleasanter aspect, and nothing can be more charming than the
soft green slopes, dotted with the richest pines, which form the
approach to the station of Boujeailles. It is impossible for the most
careless traveller to avoid observing the ill effects produced upon the
trees on the south side of the forest of Chaux, by the crowded and
neglected state in which they have been left, and the wet state of the
soil. The branches become covered with moss, which first kills them, and
then breaks them off, so that many tall and tapering sapins point their
heads to the sky with trunks wholly guiltless of branches; while in
other cases, where decay has not yet gone so far, the branches wear the
appearance of gigantic stags' horns, with the velvet; and when a number
of these interlace, the mosses unite in large dark patches, giving a
cedar-like air to the scene of ruin.
Up to this point, an elderly Frenchman in the carriage had been
extremely offensive, from the evil odour of his Macintosh coat; but in
answer to a remark upon the improvement which the railway would effect,
by providing ventilation for the forest, he gave so much information on
that subject, and gave it so pleasantly, and had evidently so good a
knowledge of the topography of Franche Comté, that his coat speedily
lost its smell, and we became excellent friends.
It is a tantalising thing to be whirled on a hot and dusty day through
districts famous for their wines, the dust and heat standing out in
more painful colours by contrast with the recollection of cooling
draughts which other occasions have owed to such vineyards; though,
after all, the true method of facing heat with success is to drink no
wine. At any rate, the vineyards of Arbois must always be interesting,
and if the stories of the Templars' orgies be true, we may be sure
that the chapelry which they possessed in that town would be a
favourable place of residence with the order; possibly Rule XVI. might
there be somewhat relaxed. 'The good wine of Arbois,' _la meilleure
cave de Bourgougne_, a judicious old writer says, had free entry into
all the towns of the Comté; and when Burgundy was becoming imperial,
Maximilian extended this privilege through all the towns of the
empire. A hundred years later, it had so high a character, that the
troops of Henri IV. turned away from the town, announcing that they
did not wish to attack _ceulx estoient du naturel de leur vin, qui
frappe partout_;[26] and the king was forced to come himself, with his
constable and marshals, to beat down the walls, in the course of which
undertaking his men felt the vigour of the inhabitants to a greater
extent than he liked. It is said that when he had taken the town, the
municipality received him in state, and supplied him with wine of the
country. He praised the wine very highly, on which one of the body had
the ill taste to assure him that they had a better wine than that.
'You keep it, perhaps,' was the royal rebuke, 'for a better occasion.'
Henry had a great opinion of this wine; and the Duc de Sully states,
in his Memoirs, that when the Duc de Mayenne retired from the league
against the king, and came to Monceaux to tender his allegiance, Henry
punished him for past offences by walking so fast about the grounds of
the château, that the poor duke, what with his sciatica, and what with
his fat, at last told him with an expressive gesture that a minute
more of it would kill him. The king thereupon let him go, and promised
him some _vin d'Arbois_ to set him right again.[27]
The present appearance of the town, as seen from the high level followed
by the railway, scarcely recalls the time when Arbois was known as _le
jardin de noblesse_, and Barbarossa dated thence his charters, or Jean
Sans-peur held there the States of Burgundy. Gollut[28] tells a story of
a dowager of Arbois, mother-in-law to Philip V. and Charles IV. of
France, which outdoes legend of Bishop Hatto. Mahaut d'Artois was an
elderly lady remarkable for her charities, and was by consequence always
surrounded by large crowds of poor folk during her residence at the
Châtelaine, the ruins of which lie a mile or two from Arbois. On the
occasion of a severe famine in Burgundy, she collected a band of her
mendicant friends in a stable, and burned them all, saying that '_par
pitié elle hauoit faict cela, considerant les peines que ces pauvres
debuoient endurer en temps de si grande et tant estrange famine_.'
There is a Val d'Amour near Arbois, but the more beautiful valley of
that name lies between Dôle and Besançon, and, as we passed its
neighbourhood, my friend with the Macintosh informed me that as it was
clear from my questions that I was drawing up a history of the Franche
Comté, he must beg me to insert a legend respecting the origin of this
name, Val d'Amour, which, he believed, had never appeared in print. I
disclaimed the history, but accepted the legend, and here it is:--The
Seigneur of Chissey was to marry the heiress of a neighbouring
seigneurie, and, it is needless to add, she was very lovely, and he was
handsome and brave. A lake separated the two châteaux, and the young man
not unfrequently returned by water rather late in the evening; and so it
fell out that one night he was drowned. The lady naturally grieved
sorely for her loss, and put in train all possible means for recovering
her lover's body. Time, however, passed on, and no success attended her
efforts, till at length she caused the hills which dammed up the waters
to be pierced, and then De Chissey was found. A village sprang up near
the outlet thus made, and took thence its name Percée, or, as men now
spell it, Parcey; and the rich vegetation which speedily covered the
valley, where once the lake had been, gave it such an air of happiness
and beauty, that the people remembered its origin, and called it the
Valley of Love. It is a fact that Parcy was not always so spelled, for
Noble Constantin Thiehault, Sieur de Perrecey, was a witness to the
treaty for the transference of a miraculous host from Faverney to Dôle
in 1608, and old maps and books give it as Perrecey and Parrecey
indifferently. The De Chisseys, whose names may be found among the
female prebends of Château-Chalon, with its necessary sixteen quarters,
filled a considerable place in the history of the Comté from the
Crusades downwards, and known as _les Fols de Chissey_, the brave[29]
and dashing, and witty De Chisseys--qualities which no doubt were
possessed by the poor young man for whom the fair Chatelaine drained the
Val d'Amour.
As we drew nearer to Besançon, each turn of the small streams, and each
low rounded hill, might have served as an illustration to Cæsar's
'Commentaries.' Now at length it was seen how, whatever the result of a
battle, there was always a _proximus collis_ for the conquered party to
retire to; and it would have been easy to find many suitable scenes for
the critical engagement, where the woods sloped down to a strip of
grass-land between their foot and the stream.
The Frenchman knew his Cæsar, but he put that general in the fourth
century B.C. He made mistakes, too, in quoting him, which were easily
detected by a memory bristling with the details of his phraseology, the
indelible result of extracting the principal parts of his verbs, and the
nominatives of his irregular nouns, from half a dozen generations of
small boys. He promised me a rich Julian feast in Besançon, and was
greatly affected when he found that the Englishman could give him
Cæsar's description of his native town. He wholly denied the
amphitheatre with which one of our handbooks has gifted it; and this
denial was afterwards echoed by every one in Besançon, some even
thinking it necessary to explain the difference between an amphitheatre
and an arch of triumph, the latter still existing in the town. The
Jesuit Dunod relates that the amphitheatre was to be seen at the
beginning of the seventeenth century, in the ruined state in which the
Alans and Vandals had left it after their successful siege in 406. It
seems to have stood near the present site of the Madeleine.
It was a great satisfaction to find that the Frenchman had himself
visited the glacière which was the object of my search, and was able to
give some idea as to the manner of reaching it, for my information on
the subject was confined to a vague notice that there was an ice-cave
five leagues from Besançon. As so often happened in other cases, he
advised me not to go to it, but rather, if I must see a cave, to go to
the Grotto of Ocelles,[30] a collection of thirty or more caverns and
galleries near the Doubs, below Besançon. Seeing, however, that I was
bent on visiting the glacière, he advised me not to go on Sunday, for
the Cardinal Archbishop had ordered the Trappists at the Chartreuse near
not to receive guests on that day; while Saturday, he thought, was
almost as bad, for nothing better than an omelette could be obtained on
days of abstinence. Saturday, then, was clearly the day to be chosen.
The first sight of Besançon explains at once why Cæsar was so anxious
to forestall Ariovistus by occupying Vesontio, although the hill on
which the citadel stands is not so striking as the similar hill at
Salins, and the engines of modern warfare would promptly print their
telegrams on every stone and man in the place, from the neighbouring
heights. The French Government has wisely taken warning from the
bombardment by the Allies, and has covered the heights which command it
on either side with friendly fortifications, in which lie the keys of
the place. Historically, Besançon is a place of great interest. It
witnessed the catastrophe of Julius Vindex, who had made terms with
Rufus, the general sent against him by Nero, but was attacked by the
troops of Rufus before they learned the alliance concluded between the
two generals. Vindex was so much grieved by the slaughter of his troops,
and the blow thus struck, by an unhappy accident, at his designs against
the emperor, that he put himself to death at the gates of the town,
while the fight was still going on.[31] The Bisuntians claim to
themselves the glory acquired by the Sequani, whose chief city Vesontio
was, by the overthrow of Julius Sabinus, who asserted that he was the
grandson of a son of Julius Cæsar, and proclaimed himself emperor in
the time of Vespasian. The Sequani proceeded against him of their own
accord, and conquered him in the interest of the reigning emperor; and
he and his wife Peponilla lived hid in a tomb for nine years. Here two
sons were born to them; and when they were all discovered and carried to
Rome, Peponilla prettily told the emperor that she had brought up two
sons in the tomb, in order that there might be other voices to intercede
for her husband's life besides her own. They were, however, put to
death.[32]
To judge from the style of the hotels, Besançon is not visited by many
English travellers; and yet it well repays a visit, providing those who
care for such things with a full average of vaulted passages, and feudal
gateways, and arcaded court-yards, with much less than the average of
evil smell. There are gates of all shapes and times--Louis-Quatorze
towers, and fortifications specially constructed under Vauban's own eye;
while the approach to the town, from the land side, is by a tunnel, cut
through the live rock which forms a solid chord to the arc described by
the course of the river Doubs. This excavation, called appropriately the
_Porte Taillée_, is attributed by the various inhabitants to pretty
nearly all the famous emperors and kings who have lived from Julius
Cæsar to Louis XIV.: it owes its origin, no doubt, to the construction
of the aqueduct which formerly brought into the town the waters pouring
out of the rock at Arcier, two leagues from Besançon, and was the work
probably of M. Aurelius and L. Verus. Local antiquaries assign the
aqueduct to Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus, apparently for no
better reason than because he built a similar work in Rome. The arch of
triumph[33] at the entrance to the upper town has been an inexhaustible
subject of controversy for many generations of antiquaries, and up to
the time of Dunod was generally attributed to Aurelian: that historian,
however, believed that its sculptures represented the education of
Crispus, the son of Constantine, and that the name Chrysopolis, by which
Besançon was very generally known in early times, was only a corruption
of Crispopolis. Earlier writers are in favour of the natural derivation
of Chrysopolis, and assert that when the Senones lost their famous
chief, the Brennus of Roman history, before Delphos, they built a town
where Byzantium afterwards stood, and called it Bisantium and
Chrysopolis, in memory of their city of those names at home.
The Hôtel du Nord is a rambling old house, comfortable after French
ideas of comfort, and rejoicing in an excellent cuisine; though it is
true that on one occasion, at least, _haricots verts à l'Anglaise_ meant
a mass of fibrous greens, swimming in a most un-English sea of
artificial fat. It is a good place for studying the natural manners of
the untravelled Frenchman, who there sits patiently at the table, for
many minutes before dinner is served, with his napkin tucked in round
his neck, and his countenance composed into a look of much resignation.
The waiters are for the most part shock-headed boys, in angular-tail
coats well up in the back of the neck, who frankly confess, when any
order out of the common run of orders is given, that a German patois
from the left bank of the Rhine is their only extensive language. One of
these won my eternal gratitude by providing a clean fork at a crisis
between the last savouries and the _plat doux_; for the usual practice
with the waiters, when anyone neglected to secure his knife and fork for
the next course, was to slip the plate from under the unwonted charge,
and leave those instruments sprawling on the tablecloth in a vengeful
mess of gravy. Chickens' bones were there dealt with on all sides as
nature perhaps intended that they should be dealt with, namely, by
taking them between finger and thumb, and removing superfluities with
the teeth; and French officers with wasp-like waists, and red trousers
gathered in plaits to match, boldly despised the sophistication of
spoons, and ate their vanilla cream like men, by the help of bread and
fingers. The manners and broken French of the stranger formed an open
and agreeable subject of conversation, and the table was much quieter
than a Frenchman's _table d'hôte_ is sometimes known to be: on one
occasion, however, all decorum was scattered to the winds, and the
guests rushed out into the court-yard with disordered bibs and tuckers,
on the announcement by the head waiter of a '_chien à l'Anglaise_, not
so high as a mustard-pot,' which one of the company promptly bought for
twenty-four francs, commencing its education on the spot by a lesson in
cigar-smoking.
It frequently happens in France that _café noir_ is a much more ready
and abundant tap than water, and so it was here; notwithstanding which,
the bedroom apparatus was most comfortable and complete. The chambermaid
was a boy, and under his auspices a sheet of postage-stamps and a lead
pencil vanished from the table. When it was suggested to him that
possibly they had been blown into some corner, and so swept away, he
brought a dustpan from a distant part of the house, and miraculously
discovered the stamps perched upon a small handful of dust therein,
deferring the discovery and his consequent surprise till he reached my
room. It was curious that the stamps, which had before been in an open
sheet, were now folded neatly together, and curled into the shape of a
waistcoat-pocket. He was inexorable about the pencil.
No certain information could be obtained in the hotel respecting the
glacière; so an owner of carriages was summoned, and consulted as to the
best means of getting there. He naturally recommended that one of his
own carriages should be taken as far as the Abbey of Grâce-Dieu, and
that we should start at five o'clock the next morning, with a driver who
knew the way to the glacière from the point at which the carriage must
be left.[34] Five o'clock seemed very early for a drive of fifteen
miles; but the man asserted that instead of five leagues it was a good
seven or eight, and so it turned out to be. This glacière may be called
a historical glacière, being the only one which has attracted general
attention; and the mistake about its distance from Besançon arose very
many years ago, and has been perpetuated by a long series of copyists.
The distance may not be more than five leagues when measured on the map
with a ruler; but until the tunnels and via-ducts necessary for a crow
line are constructed, the world must be content to call it seven and a
half at least. The man bargained for two days' pay for the carriage, on
the plea that the horse would be so tired the next day that he would not
be able to do any work, and as that day was Sunday, the great day for
excursions, it would be a dead loss. It so happened that the charge for
two days, fifteen francs, was exactly what I paid elsewhere for one day,
so there was no difficulty about the price.
We started, accordingly, at five o'clock. The day was delightfully
fine, and in spite of the driver's peculiarity of speech, caused by a
short tongue, and aggravated by a villanous little black pipe clutched
between his remaining teeth, we got through a large amount of question
and answer respecting the country through which we passed. Of course,
the reins were carried through rings low down on the kicking-strap,
ingeniously placed so that each whisk of the horse's tail caught one or
other rein; and then the process of extraction was a somewhat dangerous
one, for there was no splashboard, and the driver had to stow his legs
away out of reach, before commencing operations. The landlord of the inn
at Mühlinen, on the road from Kandersteg to Thun, has a worse
arrangement than even this, both reins passing through one small leather
loop at the top of the kicking-strap; so that when the horse on one
occasion ran away down a steep hill in consequence of the break refusing
to act, the man in his flurry could not tell which rein to pull, to
steer clear of the wall of rock on one side, and the unfenced slope on
the other, and finally flung himself out in despair, leaving his English
cargo behind.
There has evidently been at some time a vast lake near Besançon, and the
old bottom of the lake is now covered with heavy meadow-grass, while the
corn-fields and villages creep down from the higher grounds, on the
remains of promontories which stretch out into the plain. The people are
in constant fear of inundation, and the driver informed me that in
winter large parts of the plain are flooded, the superfluous waters
vanishing after a time into a great hole, whose powers of digestion he
could not explain. The villages which lie on the shores, as it were, of
the lake, rejoice in church-towers with bulbous domes, rising out of
rich clusters of trees, and the early bells rang out through the crisp
air with something of a Belgian sweetness. Farther on, the road passed
through glorious wheat, clean as on an English model farm, save where
some picturesque farmer had devoted a corner to the growth of poppies.
Here, as elsewhere, potatoes did not grow in ridges, but each root had a
little hillock to itself; an unnatural early training which may account
for the strange appearance of _pommes de terre au naturel_.
Anyone who has driven through the morning air for an hour or two before
breakfast, will understand the satisfaction with which, about seven
o'clock, we deciphered a complicated milestone into 14 kilomètres from
Besançon, which meant breakfast at the next village, Nancray. The
breakfast was simple enough, owing to the absence of butter and other
things, and consisted of coffee in its native pot, and dry bread: the
milk was set on the table in the pan in which it had been boiled, and a
soup-ladle and a French wash-hand basin took the place of cup and spoon.
A cat kept the door against sundry large and tailless dogs, whose
appetites had not gone with their tails; and an old woman kindly
delivered a lecture on the most approved method of making a ptisan from
the flowers of the lime-tree, and on the many medicinal properties of
that decoction, to which she attributed her good health at so advanced
an age. I silently supplemented her peroration by attributing her
garrulity to a more stimulating source.
When we started again, it was time to learn something about the scene of
our further proceedings, and the driver enunciated his views on monks in
general, _à propos_ to the Convent of Grâce-Dieu, the Chartreuse at
which we were to leave our carriage, and obtain food for man and horse.
The Brothers, he said, were possessed of many mills, and were in
consequence enormously rich. Among the products of their industry, a
liqueur known as _Chartreuse_ seemed to fill a high place in his esteem,
for he considered it to be better--and he said it as if that
comparative led into an eighth heaven--better even than absinthe. I had
an opportunity of tasting this liqueur some weeks after, a few minutes
below the summit of Mont Blanc, and certainly no one would suspect its
great strength, which is entirely disguised by an innocent and insidious
sweetness, as unlike absinthe as anything can possibly be: impressions,
however, respecting meat and drink, and all other matters, are not very
trustworthy when received near the top of the Calotte. It has lately
been found that the worthy Brothers of the Grande Chartreuse have been
systematically defrauding the revenue, by returning their profits on the
manufacture of this liqueur at something merely nominal as compared with
the real gains. I could not learn whether the ceremony of blessing each
batch of the liqueur, before sending it out to intoxicate the world, is
performed with so much solemnity at Grâce-Dieu as at Grenoble; and,
indeed, it rests only on the assertion of the short-tongued Bisuntian
that the manufacture is carried on at all at the former place.[35]
Having communicated such information as he possessed, the man seemed to
think he had a right to learn something in return, and administered
various questions respecting customs which he believed to prevail in
England. He evidently did not credit the denial of the truth of what he
had heard, nor yet the assertion, in answer to another question, that
English hothouse grapes are three or four times as large as the ordinary
grapes of France, and well-flavoured in at least a like proportion. The
roadside was planted with apple-trees, and these were overgrown with
mistletoe; so, by way of correcting his idea that the English are a sad
and gloomy people, I informed him of the use made of this parasite by
young people in the country at Christmas-time. Instead, however, of
being thereby impressed with our national liveliness, he looked with a
sort of supercilious contempt upon a people who could require the
intervention or sanction of anything external in such a matter, and
turned the conversation to some more worthy subject.
At length we passed into a pleasant valley, with thrushes singing, and
much chirping of those smaller birds, in the murder of which, sitting,
consists _le sport_ in the eyes of many gentlemen of France. Up to this
point, nothing could have been more unlike the scenery which I had so
far found to be associated with glacières; but now the country became
slightly more Jurane, and limestone precipices on a small scale rose up
on either hand, decked with the corbel towers which result from the
weathering of the rock. It was the Jura in softer as well as smaller
type, for all the desolate wildness which characterises the more rocky
part of that range was gone, and there were no signs of the grand
pine-scenery, or needle-foliage, as the Germans call it; the trees were
all oak and ash and beech, and the rocks were much more neat and
orderly, and of course less grand, than their contorted kindred farther
south. The valley speedily became very narrow, and a final bend brought
us face-to-face with the buildings of the Abbaye de Grâce-Dieu, striking
from their position--filling, as they do, the breadth of the
valley,--but in no way remarkable architecturally. The journey had been
so long that it was now ten o'clock; and as we were due in Besançon at
five in the evening, we put the horse up as quickly as possible, in a
shed provided by the Brothers, and set off on foot for the glacière,
half an hour distant. About a mile and a half from the convent, the
valley comes to an end, the rocks on the opposite sides approaching so
close to each other as only to leave room for a large flour-mill,
belonging to the Brothers, and for the escape-channel of the stream
which works the mill. This building is quite new, and might almost be
taken for a fortification against inroads by the head of the valley,
especially as the words _Posuerunt me custodem_ appear on the face,
applying, however, to an image of the Virgin, which presides over the
establishment. The monks have expended their superfluous time and
energies upon the erection of crosses of all sizes on every projecting
peak and point of rock, one cross more sombre than the rest marking the
scene of a recent death. As I had no means of determining the elevation
of this district above the sea,[36] I made enquiries as to the climate
in winter; and one of the Brothers told me, that it was an unusual thing
with them to have a fall of snow amounting to two joints of a remarkably
dirty finger.
At the mill, the path turns up the steep wooded hill on the right, and
leads through young plantations to a small cottage near the glacière,
where the plantations give place to a well-grown beech wood. Here my
conductor startled me by announcing that there was 20 centimes to pay
to the farmer of the cave for entrance; an announcement which seemed to
take all the pleasure out of the expedition, and invested it with the
disagreeable character of sightseeing. The poor driver thought, no
doubt, with some trepidation upon the small amount of _pour-boire_ he
could expect from a monsieur on whom a demand for two pence produced so
serious an effect, and it was difficult to make him understand that the
fact and not the amount of payment was the trouble. When I illustrated
this by saying that I would gladly give a franc to be allowed to enter
the glacière free, he seemed to think that if I would entrust him with
the franc, he might possibly arrange that little matter for me.
The immediate approach to the glacière is very impressive. The surface
of the ground slopes slightly upwards, and the entrance, from north to
south, is by a broad inclined plane, of gentle fall at first, which
rapidly becomes steep enough to require zigzags. The walls of rock on
either side are very sheer, and increase of course in height as the
plane of entrance falls. The whole length of the slope is about 420
feet, and down a considerable part of this some grasses and flowers are
to be found: the last 208 feet are covered more or less with ice;
though, at the time of my visit, the furious rains of the end of June,
1864, had washed down a considerable amount of mud, and so covered some
of the ice. There were no ready means of determining the thickness of
this layer of ice, for the descent of which ten or eleven zigzags had
been made by the farmer. In one place, within 24 feet of its upper
commencement, it was from 2-1/2 to 3 feet thick; but the prominence of
that part seemed to mark it out as of more than the average thickness.
Even where to all appearance there was nothing but mud and earth, an
unexpected fall or two showed that all was ice below. Whether the driver
had previously experienced the treacherousness of this slope of ice,
or whatever his motive might be, he left me to enter and explore alone.
The roof of the entrance is at first a mere shell, formed by the thin
crust of rock on which the surface-earth and trees rest high overhead;
but this rapidly becomes thicker, as shown in the section of the cave,
and thus a sort of outer cave is formed, the real portal of the glacière
being reached about 60 feet above the bottom of the slope. This outer
cave presents a curious appearance, from the distinctness with which the
several strata of the limestone are marked, the lower strata weathered
and rounded off like the seats of an amphitheatre of the giants, and
all, up to the shell-like roof, arranged in horizontal semicircles of
various graduated sizes, showing their concavity; while at the bottom of
the whole is seen a patch of darkness, with two masses of ice in its
centre, looming out like grey ghosts at midnight. This darkness is of
course the inner cave, the entrance to which, though it seems so small
from above, is 78 feet broad.
The glacière itself may be said to commence as soon as this entrance,
or perpendicular portal, is passed, and thus includes 60 feet of the
long slope of ice, from the foot of which to the farther end of the
cave is 145 feet, the greatest breadth of the cave being 148 feet.
Immediately below the portal I found a piece of the trunk of a large
column of ice, 7 feet long and 12 feet in girth, its fractured ends
giving the idea of the interior of a quickly-grown tree, in
consequence of the concentric arrangement of convergent prisms
described in the account of the Glacière of S. Georges. The wife of
the farmer told me afterwards that there had been two glorious
columns at this portal, which the recent rains had swept away.
Excepting a short space at the foot of the slope, and another towards
the farther end of the cave, the floor was covered with ice, in some
parts from 3 to 4 feet thick: of this a considerable area had been
removed to a depth of 2 1/2 or 3 feet, leaving a pond of water a foot
deep, with bottom and banks of ice. The rock which composes the true
floor rises at the farthest end of the cave, and the roof is so
arranged that a sort of private chapel is there formed; and from a
fissure in the dome a monster column of ice had been constructed on
the floor, which, at the time of my visit, had lost its upper parts,
and stood as a hollow truncated cone with sides a foot thick, and with
seas of ice streaming from it, and covering the rising pavement of the
chapel. Without an axe, and without help, I was unable to measure the
girth of this column, which had not been without companions on a
smaller scale in the immediate neighbourhood. At the west end of the
cave, the wall was thickly covered for a large space with small
limestone stalactites, producing the effect of many tiers of fringe on
a shawl; while from a dark fissure in the roof a large piece of fluted
drapery of the same material hung, calling to mind some of the vastly
grander details of the grottoes of Hans-sur-Lesse in Belgium: down
this wall there was also a long row of icicles, on the edges of a
narrow fissure. The north-west corner was very dark, and an opening in
the wall of rock high above the ground suggested a tantalising cave up
there: the ground in this corner was occupied by the shattered remains
of numerous columns of ice, which had originally covered a circular
area between 60 and 70 feet in circumference.
[Illustration: VERTICAL SECTION OF THE GLACIÈRE OF GRÂCE-DIEU, NEAR
BESANÇON.]
The three large masses of ice which rendered this glacière in some
respects more remarkable than any of those I have seen, lay in a line
from east to west, across the middle of the cave, on that part of the
floor where the ice was thickest. The central mass was extremely
solid, but somewhat unmeaning in shape, being a rough irregular
pyramid; its size alone, however, was sufficient to make it very
striking, the girth being 66-1/2 feet at some distance from the
ice-floor with which it blended. The mass which lay to the east of
this was very lovely, owing to the good taste of some one who had
found that much ice was wont to accumulate on that spot, and had
accordingly fixed the trunk of a small fir-tree, with the upper
branches complete, to receive the water from the corresponding fissure
in the roof. The consequence was, that, while the actual tree had
vanished from sight under its icy covering, excepting on one side
where a slight investigation betrayed its presence, the mass of ice
showed every possible fantasy of form which a mould so graceful could
suggest. At the base, it was solid, with a circumference of 37 feet.
The huge column, which had collected round the trunk of the fir-tree,
branched out at the top into all varieties of eccentricity and beauty,
each twig of the different boughs becoming, to all appearance, a solid
bar of frosted ice, with graceful curve, affording a point of
suspension for complicated groups of icicles, which streamed down side
by side with emulous loveliness. In some of the recesses of the
column, the ice assumed a pale blue colour; but as a rule it was white
and very hard, not so regularly prismatic as the ice described in
former glacières, but palpably crystalline, showing a structure not
unlike granite, with a bold grain, and with a large predominance of
the glittering element. But the westernmost mass was the grandest and
most beautiful of all. It consisted of two lofty heads, like weeping
willows in Carrara marble, with three or four others less lofty,
resembling a family group of lions' heads in a subdued attitude of
grief, richly decked with icy manes. Similar heads seemed to grow out
here and there from the solid sides of the huge mass. The girth was
76-1/2 feet, measured about 2 feet from the floor. When this column was
looked at from the side removed from the entrance to the cave, so
that it stood in the centre of the light which poured down the long
slope from the outer world, the transparency of the ice brought it to
pass that the whole seemed set in a narrow frame of impalpable liquid
blue, the effect of light penetrating through the mass at its extreme
edges. The only means of determining the height of this column was by
tying a stone to the end of a string, and lodging it on the highest
head; but this was not an easy process, as I was naturally anxious not
to injure the delicate beauty which made that head one of the
loveliest things conceivable; and each careful essay with the stone
seemed to involve as much responsibility as taking a shot at a hostile
wicket, in a crisis of the game, instead of returning the ball in the
conventional manner. When at last it was safely lodged, the height
proved to be 27 feet. I had hoped to find it much more than this, from
the grandeur of the effect of the whole mass, and I took the trouble
to measure the knotted string again with a tape, to make sure that
there was no mistake. The column formed upon the fir-tree was 3 or 4
feet lower.
I have since found many notices of this glacière in the Memoirs of the
French Academy and elsewhere, extracts from which will be found in a
later chapter. These accounts are spread over a period of 200 years,
extending from 1590 to 1790, and almost all make mention of the columns
or groups of columns I have described; but, without exception, the
heights given or suggested in the various accounts are much less than
those which I obtained as the result of careful measurement. The latest
description of a visit to the glacière states a fact which probably will
be held to explain, the present excess of height above that of earlier
times.[37] The citizen Girod-Chantrans, who wrote this description, had
procured the notes of a medical man living in the neighbourhood, from
which it seemed that Dr. Oudot made the experiment, in 1779, of fixing
stakes of wood in the heads of the columns, then from 4 to 5 feet high,
and found that these stakes were the cause of a very large increase in
the height of the columns, ice gathering round them in pillars a foot
thick. So that it is not improbable that the largest of the three masses
of the present day owes its height, and its peculiar form, to a series
of stakes fixed from time to time in the various heads formed under the
fissures in the roof, though nothing but the most solid ice can now be
seen. It would be very interesting to try this experiment in one of the
caves where, without any artificial help, such immense masses of ice are
formed; and by this means columns might, in the course of a year or two,
be raised to the very roof. Further details on this subject will be
given hereafter.
There was no perceptible draught of air in any part of the cave, and the
candles burned steadily through the whole time of my visit, which
occupied more than two hours. The centre was sufficiently lighted by the
day; but in the western corner, and behind the largest column,
artificial light was necessary. The ice itself did not generally show
signs of thawing, but the whole cave was in a state of wetness, which
made the process of measuring and investigating anything but pleasant.
I had placed two thermometers at different points on my first
entrance--one on a drawing-board on a large stone in the middle of the
pond of water which has been mentioned, and the other on a bundle of
pencils at the entrance of the end chapel, in a part of the cave where
the ice-floor ceased for a while, and left the stones and rock bare. The
former gave 33°, the latter, till I was on the point of leaving, 31
1/2°, when it fell suddenly to 31°. It was impossible, however, to stay
any longer for the sake of watching the thermometer fall lower and lower
below the freezing point; indeed, the results of sundry incautious
fathomings of the various pools of water, and incessant contact of hands
and feet with the ice, had already become so unpleasant, that I was
obliged to desert my trusty hundred feet of string, and leave it lying
on the ice, from want of finger-power to roll it up. The thermometers
were both Casella's, but that which registered 31° was the more lively
of the two, the other being mercurial, with a much thicker stem: the
difference in sensitiveness was so great, that when they were equally
exposed to the sun in driving home, the one ran up to 93° before the
other had reached 85°.
In leaving the glacière, I found a little pathway turning off along the
face of the rock on the left hand, a short way up the slope of entrance,
and looking as if it might lead to the opening in the dark wall on the
western side of the cave. After a time, however, it came to a corner
which it seemed an unnecessary risk to attempt to pass alone; and my
prudence was rewarded by the discovery that, after all, the supposed
cave could not be thus reached. It is said that this other cave was the
place to which the inhabitants fled for refuge when their district was
invaded, probably by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar with his 10,000 Swedes,
and that a ladder 40 feet long is necessary for getting at it.
The driver had long ago absconded when I returned to the upper regions;
but the wife of the farmer of the grotto was there, and communicated
all that she knew of the statistics of the ice annually removed. She
said that in 1863 two chars were loaded every day for two months, each
char taking about 600 kilos, the wholesale price in Besançon being 5
francs the hundred kilos. Since the quintal contains 50 kilos, it will
be seen that this account does not agree with the statement of Renaud as
to the amount of ice each char could take. No doubt, a char at S.
Georges may mean one thing, and a char in the village of Chaux another;
but the difference between 12 quintaux and 50 or 60 is too great to be
thus explained, and probably Madame Briot made some mistake. Her
husband, Louis Briot, works alone in the cave, and has twelve men and a
donkey to carry the ice he quarries to the village of Chaux, a mile from
the glacière, where it is loaded for conveyance to Besançon. He uses
gunpowder for the flooring of ice, and expects the eighth part of a
pound to blow out a cubic metre; and if, by ill luck, the ice thus
procured has stones on the lower side, he has to saw off the bottom
layer. Madame Briot said I was right in supposing March to be the great
time for the formation of ice, as she had heard her husband say that the
columns were higher then than at any other time of the year: she also
confirmed my views as to the disastrous effects of heavy rain. As with
every other glacière of which I could obtain any account, excepting the
Lower Glacière of the Pré de S. Livres, she complained that the ice had
not been so beautiful and so abundant this year as last, although the
winter had been exceptionally severe.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 26: Jean Bontemps, Conseiller au bailliage d'Arbois.]
[Footnote 27: 'Allez vous en reposer, rafraischir et boire un coup au
chasteau, car vous en avez bon besoin; j'ay du vin d'Arbois en mes
offices, dont je vous envoyeray deux bouteilles, car je scay bien que
vous ne le hayés pas.'--_Petitot_. iii. 9.]
[Footnote 28: Mém. de la Comté de Bourgougne, Dôle, 1592, p. 486.]
[Footnote 29: One of the Seigneurs de Chissey, Michaud de Changey, who
died in high office in 1480, was known by preeminence as _le Brave_.]
[Footnote 30: Dr. Buckland visited these caves in 1826, to look for
bones, of which he found a great number. Gollut (in 1592) spelled the
name _Aucelle_, and derived it from _Auricella_, believing that the
Romans worked a gold mine there. It is certain that both the Doubs and
the Loue supplied very fine gold, and the Seigneurs of Longwy had a
chain made of the gold of those rivers, which weighed 160 crowns.]
[Footnote 31: Dion Cass. lib. lxiii.]
[Footnote 32: Ib. lib. lxvi.]
[Footnote 33: Known locally as the _Porte Noire_, like the great _Porta
Nigra_ at Treves, and other Roman gates in Gaul.]
[Footnote 34: I should be inclined, from what I saw of the country, to
go to the station of Baume-les-Dames on any future visit, and walk
thence to the glacière, perhaps three leagues from the station.]
[Footnote 35: He was in error. The Paris correspondent of the 'Times'
gave, some months since (see the impression of Jan. 20, 1865), an
account of an interesting trial respecting the manufacture of the
liqueur peculiar to the Abbey of Grâce-Dieu. From this account it
appears that the liqueur was formerly called the Liqueur of the
Grâce-Dieu, but is now known as Trappistine. It is limpid and oily;
possesses a fine aroma, a peculiar softness, a mild but brisk flavour,
and so on. It was invented by an ecclesiastic who was once the Brother
Marie-Joseph, and prior of the convent, but is now M. Stremler, having
been released by the Pope from his vows of obedience and poverty, in
order that he might teach Christianity to the infidels of the New World.
The Brothers took the question of the renunciation of poverty into their
own hands, by declining to give up the money which Brother Marie-Joseph
had originally brought into the society; so M. Stremler, being now
moneyless, commenced the secular manufacture of the seductive
Trappistine, in opposition to the regular manufacture within the walls
of the Abbey, abstaining, however, from the use of the religious label
which is the Brothers' trade-mark. The unfortunate inventor was fined
and condemned in costs for his piracy.]
[Footnote 36: See p. 310.]
[Footnote 37: _Journal des Mines_, Prairial, an iv., pp. 65, &c.]
* * * * *
CHAPTER VI.
BESANÇON AND DÔLE.
The afternoon was so far advanced when I returned to the convent, that
it was clearly impossible to reach Besançon at five o'clock, and
consequently there was time to inspect the Brothers and their buildings.
The field near the convent was gay with haymakers; and the brown monks,
with here and there a priest in _ci-devant_ white, moved among the hired
labourers, and stirred them up by exhortation and example,--with this
difference, that while it was evidently the business of the monks so to
do, the priests, on the other hand, had only taken fork in hand for the
sake of a little gentle exercise. One unhappy Jacques Bonhomme made hot
and toilsome hay in thick brown clothes, plainly manufactured from a
defunct Brother's gown; for, to judge from appearances, a cast-off gown
is a thing unknown. It was good to see a Brother, in horn spectacles of
mediæval cut, tenderly chopping a log for firewood, and peering at it
through his spectacles after each stroke, as a man examines some
delicate piece of natural machinery with a microscope; to see another
Brother, the sphere of whose duties lay in the flour-mill, standing in
the doorway with brown robe and shaven crown all powdered alike with
white, and a third covered from head to foot with sawdust; or, best of
all, to see an antique Brother, with scarecrow legs, and low shoes which
had presumably been in his possession or that of his predecessors for a
long series of years, wheeling a barrow of liquid manure, with his gown
looped up high by means of stout whipcord and an arrangement of large
brass rings. The Brother whose business it was to do such cooking as
might be required by visitors, grinned in the most friendly and
engaging manner from ear to ear when he was looked at; and, by fixing
him steadily with the eye, he could be kept for considerable spaces of
time standing in the middle of the kitchen, knife in hand, with the
corners of his mouth out of sight round his broad cheeks. His ample
front was decked with a blue apron, suspended from his shoulders, and
confined round the convexity of his waist by an old strap which no
respectable costermonger would have used as harness. The soup served was
by courtesy called _soupe maigre,_ but it was in fact _soupe maigre_
diluted by many homoeopathic myriads, and the Brother showed much
curiosity as to my opinion of its taste--a curiosity which I could not
satisfy without hurting his professional pride. When that course was
finished, the large-faced cook suggested an omelette, as the most
substantial thing allowed on eves, proceeding to draw the materials from
a closet which so fully shared in the general abstinence from water as a
means of cleansing, that I shut my eyes upon all further operations, and
ate the eventual omelette in faith. Its excellence called forth such
hearty commendations, that there seemed to be some danger of the mouth
not coming right again. Then salads, and bread and butter, and wine, and
various kinds of cheese were brought, which made in all a very fair
dinner for a fast-day.
The culinary monk knew nothing of the history of his convent, beyond the
bare year of its foundation, and displayed a monotonous dead level of
ignorance on all topographical and historical questions: to him the
_Pain d'Abbaye_[38] meant nothing further than the staff of life there
provided, and he neither knew himself nor could recommend any Brother
who knew anything about the glacière. He was a German, and we talked of
his native Baiern and the modern glories of his capital; and when his
questions elicited a declaration of my profession, he passed up to
Saxony, and pinned me with Luther. Finding that I objected to being so
pinned, and repudiated something of that which his charge involved, he
waived Luther, of whom he knew nothing beyond his name, and came down
upon me triumphantly with the word Protestant. I explained to him, of
course, that the worthy Elector, and his friends who protested, had not
much to do with the Anglican branch of the Church Catholic; and then the
old task had to be gone through of assuring the assembled Brothers that
we in England have Sacraments, have Orders, have a Trinitarian Creed.
At length, about half-past three, we started for Besançon, paying of
course _à volonté_ for food and entertainment, as we did not choose to
qualify as paupers. The driver told me on the way that there was another
glacière at Vaise, a village three or four kilomètres from Besançon, and
at no great distance from the road by which we should approach the town;
so, when we reached the crest above Morre, where the road passes the
final ridge by means of a tunnel, I paid the carriage off, and walked to
the village of Vaise. The public-house knew of the glacière--knew indeed
of two,--further still, kept the keys of both. This was good news,
though the idea of keys in connection with an ice-cave was rather
strange; and I proposed to organise an expedition at once to the
glacières. The male half of the auberge declared that he was forbidden
to open them to strangers, except by special order from a certain
monsieur in Besançon; but the female half, scenting centimes, stated her
belief that the monsieur in Besançon could never wish them to turn away
a stranger who had come so many kilomètres through the dust to see the
ice. She put the proposed disobedience in so persuasive and Christian a
form, that I was obliged to take the husband's side,--not that he was in
any need of support, for he had been longer married than Adam was, and
showed no signs of giving way. It turned out, after all, that though
there was no doubt about the existence of the glacières, there was
equally no doubt that they were _glacières artificielles_, being simply
ice-houses dug in the side of a hill, and the property of a _glacier_ in
Besançon; so that my friend the driver had sent me to a mare's-nest.
The pathway across the hills to Besançon was rather intricate, and by
good fortune an old Frenchman appeared, who was returning from his work
at a neighbouring church, and served as companion and guide. He had bid
farewell to sixty some years before, and, being a builder, had been
going up and down a ladder all day, with full and empty _hottes_, to an
extent which outdid the Shanars of missionary meetings; and yet he
walked faster than any foreigner of my experience. He talked in due
proportion, and told some interesting details of the bombardment of
Besançon, which he remembered well. When he learned that I was not
German, but English, he told me they did not say _Anglais_ there, but
_Gaudin_,--I was a _Gaudin_. This he repeated persistently many times,
with an air worthy of General Cyrus Choke, and half convinced me that
there was something in it, and that I might after all be a Gaudin. It
was not till some hours after, that I remembered the indelible
impression made by the piety of speech of recent generations of
Englishmen upon the French nation at large, and thus was enabled to
trace the origin of the name _Gaudin_. The old man evidently believed
that it was the proper thing to call an Englishman by that name; thus
reminding me of a story told of a French soldier in the Austrian service
during the long early wars with Switzerland. The Austrians called the
Swiss, in derision, Kühmelkers--a term more opprobrious than _bouviers_;
and it is said that, after the battle of Frastens--one of the battles of
the Suabian war,--a Frenchman threw himself at the feet of some Grisons
soldiers, and innocently prayed thus for quarter; '_Très-chers,
très-honorables, et très-dignes Kühmelkers! au nom de Dieu, ne me tuez
pas_!'
The town of Besançon seems to spend its Sunday in fishing, and is
apparently well contented with that very limited success which is wont
to attend a Frenchman's efforts in this branch of _le sport_. There is a
proverb in the patois of Vaud which says '_Kan on vau dau pesson, sé fo
molli_;'[39] and on this the Bisuntians act, standing patiently half-way
up the thigh in the river, as the Swiss on the Lake of Geneva and other
lakes may be seen to do. It is all very well to wade for a good salmon
cast, or to spend some hours in a swift-foot[40] Scotch stream for the
sake of a lively basket of trout; but to stand in a Sunday coat and hat,
and 2-1/2 feet of water, watching a large bung hopelessly unmoved on the
surface, is a thing reserved for a Frenchman indulging in a weekly
intoxication of Sabbatical sport, under the delirious form of the
_chasse aux goujons_.
Clean as the town within the circuit of the river is, the houses which
overhang the water on the other side are picturesque and dirty in the
extreme, story rising above story, and balcony above balcony. It does
not increase their beauty, and to a fastidious nose it must militate
against their eligibility as places of residence, that there is
apparently but one drain, an external one, which follows the course of
the pillars supporting the various balconies: nevertheless, from the
opposite side of the river, and when the wind sets the other way, they
are sufficiently attractive. In this quarter is found the finest church,
the Madeleine, with a very effective piece of sculpture at the east end.
The sculpture is arranged on the bottom and farther side of a sort of
cage, which is hung outside the church, but is visible from the inside
through a corresponding opening in the east wall. The subject of the
sculpture is 'The Sepulchre,' and the ends of the cage or box are
composed of rich yellow glass, through which the external light streams
into the cave of the Sepulchre; and when the church itself is becoming
dark, the effect produced by the light from the evening sky, passing
through the deep-toned glass, and softly illuminating the Sepulchre, is
indescribably solemn.
[Illustration: BATH IN THE DOUBS, AT BESANÇON.]
When Besançon was supplied by the aqueduct with the waters of Arcier,
there was a great abundance of baths, as the remains discovered in
digging new foundations show; but in the present state of the town such
things are not easily met with. The floating baths on the river are
appropriated to the other sex, and the only thing approaching to a male
bath was of a nature entirely new to me, being constructed as
follows:--There is a water-mill in the town, with a low weir stretching
across the river, down which the water rushes with no very great
violence. At the foot of this weir a row of sentry-boxes is placed,
approached by planks, and in these boxes the adventurer finds his
bath.[41] A stout piece of wood-work is fixed horizontally along the
face of the weir, and has the effect of throwing the downward water out
of its natural direction, and causing it to describe an arch, so that it
descends with much force on to the weir at a point below the wood-work.
Here two planks are placed, forming a seat and a support for the back,
and a little lower still another plank for the feet to rest upon,
without which the bather would have a good chance of being washed away.
The water boils noisily and violently on all sides and in all
directions, coming down upon the subject's shoulders with a heavy thud,
which calls to mind the tender years when something softer than a cane
was used, and sends him forth like a fresh-boiled lobster. All this,
with towels, is not dear at fourpence.
The citadel is the great sight of Besançon, and the polite
Colonel-commandant attends at his office at convenient hours to give
passes. What it might be to storm the position under the excitement of
the sport of war, I cannot say; but certainly it is a most trying affair
on a hot Sunday's afternoon, even when all is made smooth, and the gates
are opened, by a comprehensive pass. The wall mentioned by Cæsar as a
great feature of the place cut the site of the citadel off from the
town, and many signs of it were found when the cathedral of S. Stephen
was built, the unfortunate church which went down before the exigencies
of a siege under Louis XIV. The barrack-master proved to be a most
interesting man, knowing many details of Cæsar's life and campaigns
which I suspect were not known to that captain himself. He had served in
Algeria, and assented to the proposition that more soldiers died there
of absinthe than of Arabs, stating his conviction that three-fourths of
the whole deaths are caused by that pernicious extract of wormwood, and
that he ought himself to have died of it long ago. He pointed out the
difference between the massive masonry of the period of the Spanish
occupation and the less impressive work of more recent times, and showed
the dungeon from which Marshal Bourmont bought his escape, in the time
of the first Napoleon.
The floor of one of the little look-out towers is composed of a
tombstone, representing a priest in full ecclesiastical dress, and my
question as to how it came there elicited the following story:--When
Louis XIV. was besieging the citadel, he placed his head-quarters, and a
strong battery, on the summit of the Mont Chaudane,[42] which commands
the citadel on one side as the Brégille does on the other. Among the
besieged was a monk named Schmidt, probably one of the Low-country men
to whom the Franche Comté was then a sort of home, as forming part of
the dominions of Spain; and this monk was the most active supporter of
the defence, against the large party within the walls which was anxious
to render the town. He was also an admirable shot; and on one of the
last days of the siege, as he stood in the little tower where the
tombstone now lies, the King and his staff rode to the front of the
plateau on the Mont Chaudane to survey the citadel; whereupon some one
pointed out to Schmidt that now he had a fair chance of putting an end
at once to the siege and the invasion. Accordingly, he took a musket
from a soldier and aimed at the King; but before firing he changed his
aim, remarking, that he, a priest, ought not to destroy the life of a
man, and so he only killed the horse, giving the Majesty of France a
roll in the mud. When the town was taken, the King enquired for the man
who killed his horse, and asked the priest whether he could have killed
the rider instead, had he wished to do so. 'Certainly,' Schmidt replied,
and related the facts of the case. Louis informed him, that had he been
a soldier, he should have been decorated for his skill and his impulse
of mercy; but, being a priest, he should be hung. The sentence was
carried out, and the priest's body was buried in the floor of the tower
from which he had spared the King's life. If this be true, it was one of
the most unkingly deeds ever done.[43]
This siege took place in the second invasion or conquest of the Franche
Comté by Louis XIV., when Besançon held out for nine days against Vauban
and the King: on the first occasion it had surrendered to Condé after
one day's siege, making the single stipulation that the Holy Shroud
should not be removed from the town.[44] The _Saincte Suaire_ was the
richest ecclesiastical treasure of the Bisuntians, being one of the two
most genuine of the many Suaires, the other being that of Turin, which
was supported by Papal Infallibility. Both were brought from the
Crusades; and the one was presented to Besançon in 1206, the other to
Turin in 1353. Bede tells a story of the proving of a Shroud by fire in
the eighth century, by one of the caliphs; and as its dimensions were 8
feet by 4, like that of Besançon, while the Shroud of Turin measured 12
feet by 3, the people of Besançon claimed that theirs was the one spoken
of by Bede.
The Cathedral of Besançon is no longer S. Stephen, since the destruction
of that church by Louis XIV. The small Church of the Citadel is now
dedicated to that saint, an inscription on the wall stating that it
takes the place of the larger church, _ex urbis obsidio anno 1674
lapsae_, and offering an indulgence of 100 days for every visit paid to
it, with the sensible proviso _una duntaxat vice per diem._ Soldiers not
being generally made of the confessing sex, or of confessing material,
there is only one confessional provided for the 6,000 souls which the
citadel can accommodate.
The Cavalry Barracks are in the lower part of the town, and near them is
a large building with evident traces of ecclesiastical architecture on
the outside. It is, in fact, a very fine church converted into stables,
retaining its interior features in excellent preservation. Under the
corn-bin lies a lady who had two husbands and fifteen children,
_Antigone in parentes, Porcia in conjuges, Sempronia in liberos_; while
a few yards further east, less agreeably placed, is an ecclesiastic of
the Gorrevod family, who reckoned Prince and Bishop and Baron among his
titles. The nave of this Church of S. Michael accommodates thirty
horses, and the north aisle thirteen; the south is considered more
select, and is boarded off for the decani, in the shape of officers'
chargers. The north side of the chancel gives room for six horses, and
the south side for a row of saddle-blocks. It had been an oversight on
the part of the original architect of the church that no place was
prepared for the daily hay; a fault which the military restorers have
remedied by improvising a lady-chapel, where the hay for the day is
placed in the morning. With Spelman in my mind, I asked if the stables
were not unhealthy; but the soldiers said they were the healthiest in
the town.[45]
The Glacière of Vaise had proved, as has been seen, to be a
mare's-nest; and yet, after all, it produced a foal; for while I was
endeavouring to overcome the evening heat of Besançon in a
_spécialité_ for ice, I found that the owner of the establishment was
also the owner of the two glacières of Vaise; and in the course of the
conversation which followed, he told me of the existence of a natural
glacière near the village of Arc-sous-Cicon, twenty kilomètres from
Pontarlier, which he had himself seen. As I had arranged to meet my
sisters at Neufchâtel, in two days' time, for the purpose of visiting
a glacière in the Val de Travers, this piece of information came very
opportunely, and I determined to attempt both glacières with them.
Some of the trains from Besançon stop for an hour at Dôle in passing
towards Switzerland by way of Pontarlier, and anyone who is interested
in the Burgundian and Spanish wars of France should take this
opportunity of seeing what may be seen of the town of Dôle and its
massive church-tower. The sieges of Dôle made it very famous in the
later middle ages, more especially the long siege under Charles
d'Amboise, at the crisis of which that general recommended his soldiers
to leave a few of the people for seed,[46] and the old sobriquet _la
Joyeuse_ was punningly changed to _la Dolente_. It has had other claims
upon fame; for if Besançon possessed one of the two most authentic Holy
Shrouds, Dôle was the resting-place of one of the undoubted miraculous
Hosts, which had withstood the flames in the Abbey of Faverney. It was
for the reception of this Host that the advocates of the Brotherhood of
Monseigneur Saint Yves built the Sainte Chapelle at Dôle.[47]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 38: One of the rights of the sovereigns of Burgundy was known
by this name. The sovereign had the power of sending one soldier
incapacitated by war to each abbey in the County, and the authorities of
the abbey were bound to make him a prebendary for life. In 1602, after
the siege of Ostend, the Archduke Albert exercised this right in favour
of his wounded soldiers, forcing lay-prebendaries upon almost all the
abbeys of the County of Burgundy. The Archduchess Isabella attempted to
quarter such a prebendary upon the Abbey of Migette, a house of nuns,
but the inmates successfully refused to receive the warrior among them
(Dunod, _Hist. de l'Église de Besançon_, i. 367). For the similar right
in the kingdom of France, see Pasquier, _Recherches de la France_, l.
xii. p. 37. Louis XIV. did not exercise this right after his conquest of
the Franche Comté, perhaps because the Hôtel des Invalides, to which the
Church was so large a contributor, met all his wants.]
[Footnote 39: '_Quand on veut du poisson, il se faut mouiller_;'
referring probably to the method of taking trout practised in the Ormont
valley, the habitat of the purest form of the patois. A man wades in the
Grand' Eau, with a torch in one hand to draw the fish to the top, and a
sword in the other to kill them when they arrive there; a second man
wading behind with a bag, to pick up the pieces.]
[Footnote 40: 'Swift-foot Almond, and land-louping Braan.']
[Footnote 41: The sentry-box is omitted in the accompanying
illustration.]
[Footnote 42: Believed to be derived from _Collis Dianæ_. Dunod found
that _Chaudonne_ was an early form of the name, and so preferred _Collis
Dominarum_, with reference to the house of nuns placed there.]
[Footnote 43: Schmidt was not without the support of example in the
indulgence of his warlike tastes. Thirty-eight years before, the
religious took so active a part in the defence of Dôle against Louis
XIII., that the Capuchin Father d'Iche had the direction of the
artillery; and when an officer of the enemy had seized the Brother
Claude by the cowl, the Father Barnabas made the officer loose his hold
by slaying him with a demi-pique. When Arbois was besieged by Henry IV.,
the Sieur Chanoine Pécauld is specially mentioned as proving himself a
_bon harquebouzier._]
[Footnote 44: There is a painting by Vander Meulen, representing this
siege, in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.]
[Footnote 45: The Church of S. Philibert, in Dijon, now a forage
magazine, has an inscription let into the wall almost ludicrously out of
keeping with the present desecrated state of the building,--_Dilexi
Domine Decorem Domus tuæ_, 1648.]
[Footnote 46: 'Qu'on les laisse pour grain!']
[Footnote 47: In the year 1648, it was suspected that some decay was
going on in the material of this Host, and the following translation
from the Latin describes the investigation entered into by the Dean and
a large body of clergy and laity, in order to quiet the public
mind:--'Après que tous les susnommés (viz. the Dean, Canons, President
of the Parliament, &c.) étant présents eurent adorés le S. Sacrement, la
custode fut ouverte avec tout le respect possible; et alors le dit Doyen
aperçut un vermisseau roulé en spirale, qu'il saisit avec la pointe
d'une épingle et plaça sur un corporal où chacun l'examina; puis on le
brûla avec un charbon pris dans l'encensoir, et ses cendres furent
jetées dans la piscine. On put alors constater tout le dommage que ce
misérable petit animal avait causé aux espèces sacrées dont les débris
ici tombaient en poussière, là se trouvaient rongés et lacérés, de telle
sorte que l'Hostie n'avait presque plus rien de sa forme circulaire, et
présentait de profondes découpures partout où le vermisseau s'était
livré à ses sinueus es évolutions.']
* * * * *
CHAPTER VII.
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
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