Higher up in the forest, we were nearly overwhelmed by a party of charcoal-porters, who came down with their traîneaux like a black avalanche. A traîneau is nothing more than a wooden sledge, on two runners, which are turned up in front, to the height of a yard, to keep the cargo in its place. In the more level parts the porter is obliged to drag this, but on the steep zigzags its own weight is sufficient to send it down; and here the porter places himself in front, with his back leaning against the sacks of charcoal and the turned-up runners, and the whole mass descends headlong, the man's legs going at a wild pace, and now one foot, now the other, steering a judicious course at the turns of the zigzags. The charcoal is made by Italians, who live on polenta and cheese high up in the mountains, and bring their manufacture down to a certain distance, after which the porters take it in charge. The men we saw told us that by hard work they could make four journeys in the day, earning a franc by each; out of which, as they said, they must support stomach and boots, one journey making them ready for a meal, and eight journeys finishing a pair of soles.
It cost us an hour and a half to reach the maire's first châlet, where we were to lunch on such food as the old woman who managed it might have on hand; that is to say, possibly bread, and, beyond that, milk only, in some shape or other. The forms under which milk can be taught to appear are manifold. A young Swiss student, who in the madness of his passion for beetle-hunting had spent fifteen days in a small châlet at Anzeindaz, sleeping each night on the hay,[[67]] gave me, some time since, a list of the various foods on which he lived and grew fat. The following is the carte, as he arranged it:--
| Viandes. | Vins. | |
| Du séret. | Du lait de vache.[[68]] | |
| Du caillé. | Du lait froid. | |
| Du beurre. | Du lait de chèvre. | |
| Du fromage gras. | Petit lait. | |
| Du fromage mi-gras. | De la crême. | |
| Du fromage maigre. | Du lait de beurre.[[69]] | |
| Tome de vache. | Petit lait de chèvre. | |
| Tome de chèvre. |
| Pour les Cochons. |
| Du lait gâté. |
| Cuite. |
Some of the solids and fluids in the earlier part of this carte we felt tolerably sure of finding at the maire's châlet, and accordingly any amount of cream and séret proved to be forthcoming. The maire asserted that cérac was the true name of this recommendable article of food, céré being the patois for the original word. Others had told us that the real word was serré, meaning compressed curds; but the French writers who treat learnedly of cheese-making in the Annales de Chimie adopt the form sérets; and in the Annales Scientifiques de l'Auvergne I find both seret and serai, from the Latin serum.There was also bread, which arrived when we were sitting down to our meal: it had been baked in a huge ring, for convenience of carriage, and was brought up from the low-lands on a stick across a boy's shoulder. When the old woman thought it safe to expose a greater dainty to our attacks, at a later period of the meal, she brought out a pot of caillé, a delightful luxury which prevails in the form of nuggets of various size floating in sour whey. Owing to a general want of table apparatus, we placed the pot of caillé on a broken wall, and speared the nuggets with our pocket-knives.
After the meal, the two Frenchmen found themselves wet and exceedingly cold; for Frenchmen have not yet learned the blessing of flannel shirts under a broiling sun. They set to work to dry themselves after an original fashion. The fire was little more than a collection of smouldering embers, confined within three stone walls about a foot high; so they took each a one-legged stool--chaises des vaches, or chaise des montagnes--and attached themselves to the stools by the usual leathern bands round the hips; then they cautiously planted the prods of the stools in the middle of the embers, maintaining an unstable equilibrium by resting their own legs on the top of the walls. Here they sat, smoking and being smoked, till they were dry and warm. Of course, in case of a slip or an inadvertent movement, they would have gone sprawling into the fire. A well-known Swiss botanist, who has seen many strange sleeping-places in the course of sixty years of flower-hunting in the mountains of Vaud and Valais, has told me that on one occasion he had reached with great difficulty the only châlet in the neighbourhood of his day's researches, at a late hour of the night, the whole mountain being soaked with rain. It was a little upland châlet, which the people had deserted for the autumn and winter; and meantime a mud avalanche had taken possession, and covered the floor to a depth of several inches. No plank was to be found for lying on; but he discovered a broken one-legged stool, and on this he sat and slept, propped as well as might be in a corner. It is difficult to say which would be worse--a fall from the stool by daylight into the embers of a wood fire, or the shuddering slimy waking about midnight, after a nod more vigorous than the rest, to find oneself plunged in eight cold inches of soft mud.
About half an hour beyond the châlet, we found the mouth of the glacière, on a large plateau almost bare of vegetation, and showing the live rock at the surface. They told me that in a strong winter there would be an average of 12 feet of snow on the ground here.[[70]] The glacière itself is approached by descending one side of a deep pit, whose circumference is larger than that of any other of the pit-glacières I have seen. A few yards off there is a smaller shaft in the rock, which we afterwards found to communicate with the glacière. The NW. side of the larger pit, being the side at the bottom of which is the arch of entrance, is vertical, and we spent the time necessary for growing cool in measuring the height of this face of rock from above. The plummet ran out 115 feet of string, and struck the slope of snow, down which the descent to the cave must be made, about 6 feet above the junction of the snow with the floor of the glacière, which was visible from the S. side of the edge of the pit; so that the total depth from the surface of the rock to the ice-floor was 121 feet.
VERTICAL SECTION OF THE GLACIÈRE OF GRAND ANU, NEAR ANNECY.
When we were sufficiently cool, we scrambled down the side of the pit opposite to that in which the archway lies, finding the rock extremely steep, and then came to a slope of 72 feet of snow, completely exposed to the weather, which landed us at the mouth of the glacière. The arch is so large, that we could detect the change of light in the cave, caused by the passage of clouds across the sun, and candles were not necessary, excepting in the pits shortly to be described. We saw at once that rapid thaw was going on somewhere or other; and when we stepped off the snow, we found ourselves in a couple of inches of soft green vegetable mud, like a compote of dark-coloured duckweed--or, to use a more familiar simile, like a mass of overboiled and ill-strained spinach. To the grief of one of us, there was ice under this, of most persuasive slipperiness. The maire said that he had never seen these signs of thaw in his visits in previous years; and as we went farther and farther into the cave, he was more and more surprised at each step to find such a large quantity of running water, and so much less ice than he had expected. The shape of the glacière is a rough circle, 60 feet in diameter; and the floor, which is solid ice, slopes gradually down to the farther end. The immediate entrance is half-closed by a steep and very regular cone of snow, lying vertically under the small shaft we had seen in the rock above. The snow which forms the cone descends in winter by this shaft; and the formation must have been going on for a considerable time, since the lower part of the cone has become solid ice, under the combined influences of pressure and of dégel and regel. I climbed up the side of this, by cutting steps in the lower part, and digging feet and hands deep into the snow higher up; and I found the length of the side to be 30 feet. I had no means of determining the height of the cave, and a guess might not be of much value.