LA GLACIÈRE DE SAINT-GEORGES.
From a Photograph by E. Truand.
We walked up through woods, in about an hour and a half, to the Glacière de Saint-Georges, which lies at an altitude of 1287 meters in the midst of the forest. There are two holes close together. One of these descends vertically and is partly roofed over with logs on which is rigged a pulley. Émery, who was the entrepreneur of the glacière, which means that he attended to getting out the ice, told me that they pulled the ice up through this vertical hole, making a noose with a rope round each block.
The other and shallower opening ended in a rock floor, which was reached by a short ladder. To the right was an arch, under which the rock terminated as a floor and descended vertically, forming the wall of the cave. On this wall two ladders, spliced at the end into one long ladder, were placed in a nearly vertical position. I tied the end of my rope round my waist, and got a workman, who had come to cut ice, to pay out the rope to me, while I went down.
The cave is rather long and narrow, perhaps twenty-five meters by twelve meters, and the limestone roof forms an arched descending curve overhead. I could not see any limestone stalactites; neither were there any ice stalactites or stalagmites in the cave, but a good part of the wall, against which the long ladder was placed, was covered by an ice curtain. It was thin and had evidently been damaged by the ice cutters or I think it would have covered the entire lower portion of the wall.
The base of the long ladder rested on an ice floor which filled the bottom of the cave, and which would probably have been level if it had not been cut out here and there in places, leaving many holes. A good many broken ice fragments lay on the floor and in some of the holes were pools of water. Some of the floor ice was exceedingly prismatic in character, and I was able to flake it off or break it easily with my hands into prisms.