THE ENTRANCE OF THE KOLOWRATSHÖHLE.
Fig. 3. Vertical Section of the Kolowratshöhle.
At the bottom of the slope we were at the lowest point of the cave, to which all the water flowed, and where it drained off into a crack with a loud gurgling noise. Back of us was the daylight streaming through the entrance; opposite to us was first an ice floor, then a great ice slope, which came down from the further end of the cave. The ice was transparent and of a pale ochre-greenish hue, and filled the entire width of the cave. There is a streak of iron, probably, through the limestone, which in places tints the rocks a dull red. The color impression is a dull green-red, and, on account of the size of the entrance, the light effect is only semi-subterranean.
The ice floor was covered with a layer of slabs of ice, eight or ten centimeters thick, which, earlier in the year, had evidently had water under them. The ice wall or ice slope consisted of two big waves, one above the other, the lower set at an angle of about ten degrees, the upper set at an angle of about twenty-five degrees. To get up the upper wave required about twelve steps cut with the axe. Behind the upper wave, five or six fissure columns streamed out to the beginning of the ice. One ice stalactite, at least two or three meters long, overhung the ice floor, and Gruber said about this: “Well, I wonder it has not fallen yet: they seldom last as late in the year,” a confirmation of what was clearly evident, namely, that the whole cave was in a state of thaw.
In two places there was a strong, continuous drip from the roof to the ice floor, which formed, in each case, what I can only call an ice basin. These basins were nearly circular; one was about four meters, the other about two, in diameter. Around about two-thirds of the rim of the larger one, ice rose in a surrounding ring two or three meters high, suggesting that earlier in the year this basin was a cone, and possibly a hollow cone. The depth in the ice floor, in both cases, was about one and a half meters, and each basin contained some thirty centimeters in depth of water. They reminded me of the rock basins one sees in mountain torrents, where an eddying current has worn smooth all the edges of the rocks. From the larger of these basins, a channel as deep as the basin ran to the lowest point of the cave. This channel was cut out by the overflow, which ran through it in a tiny stream.[3]
[3] The photographs of the Rositten Alp, of the entrance of the Kolowratshöhle, and of the interior of the Kolowratshöhle, were made for me on the 16th of July, 1896, by Herr Carl Hintner, Jr., of Salzburg. The two latter photographs are, I believe, the first good ones ever obtained of the inside of the cave. They were taken without artificial light on quick plates; the best of the two received an hour and a half, the other two hours’ exposure. The photographer said at first that it was not possible to succeed, and it was only by promising to pay him in any case, that he could be induced to try.