FREEZING CAVERN IN RUSSIA.
This famous Cavern, at Ithetz Kaya-Zastchita, in the Steppes of the Kirghis, is employed by the inhabitants as a cellar. It has the very remarkable property of being so intensely cold during the hottest summers as to be then filled with ice, which disappearing with cold weather, is entirely gone in winter, when all the country is clad in snow. The roof is hung with ever-dripping solid icicles, and the floor may be called a stalagmite of ice and frozen earth. “If,” says Sir R. Murchison, “as we were assured, the cold is greatest when the external air is hottest and driest, that the fall of rain and a moist atmosphere produce some diminution of the cold in the cave, and that upon the setting-in of winter the ice disappears entirely,—then indeed the problem is very curious.” The peasants assert that in winter they could sleep in the cave without their sheepskins.