Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland

by G. F. Browne

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.