Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland

by G. F. Browne

When I came out again from this gallery, I mounted the slope towards my companions, and tried to tempt them down. The maire felt himself to be too valuable to his country to be lightly risked, and declined to come; but Rosset took a bold heart, and dropped, after requiring from me a solemn promise that I would give him a back for his return up the rock. We visited the gallery I had already explored, and, as we stood admiring the cascade of ice, a skilful drop of water came from somewhere, and extinguished our only candle. My matches were with the maire; and I was equally sure that he would not bring them down to us, and that we could not go up to fetch them without a light. Rosset, however, very fortunately, had a box in his pocket for smoking purposes; and we cut off the wet wick, and cut down the composition to form another, and so contrived to light the candle again. While we were thus engaged, I chanced to look up for a moment, and saw far above our heads a small opening in the roof, through which a few rays of light entered from the outer world. It was so very far above us, that the uncertain rays were lost long before they got down to our level, being absorbed in the universal darkness, and being in fact rather suggested than visible even at their strongest. Those who have been at Lauterbrunnen in a very dry season, will understand how these rays presented the appearance of a ghostly Staubbach of unreal light. We must have been at an immense depth below the surface in which the opening lay; and if there had been a long day before us, it would have been curious to search for the fissure above. Sir Thomas Browne says, in the Religio Medici, 'Conceive light invisible, and that is a spirit.' We very nearly saw a spirit here.

The descent from the mouth of this chamber to the deeper recesses of the main fissure was very rough, but was speedily accomplished, and we reached a point where solid rock stopped us in face; while, to the right, a chamber with a threshold of ice was visible, and, to the left, a dark opening, down which the descent appeared to continue. From this opening all the strong cold current came. We took the ice-chamber first.

The entrance had evidently been closed till very lately by a large column of ice, and we passed over the débris, between rock portals and on a floor of solid grey ice, into a triangular cave of any height the imagination might choose to fix. The entire floor of the cave was of ice, giving the impression of infinite thickness and firmness. A little water stood on it, near the threshold, so limpid that we could not see where it commenced. The base of this triangular floor we found to be 17 feet, and its altitude 30 feet; and though these dimensions may seem comparatively small, the whole effect of the thick mass of ice on which we stood, with the cascades of ice in the corners, and the ice-figures on the walls, and the three sides of the cave passing up into sheer darkness, was exceedingly striking, situated, as it all was, so deep down in the bowels of the earth. The original entrance to the fissure, at the top of the cheminée, was, as has been said, at the base of lofty rocks, and we had descended very considerably from the entrance; so that, even without the strange light thrown upon the matter by the small hole overhead, through which we had seen the day struggling to force its way into the cavern, we should have been sure that we were now at an immense distance below the surface. One corner of the cave was occupied by a broad and solid-looking cascade, while another corner showed the opening of a very narrow fissure, curved like one of the shell-shaped crevasses of a glacier. Into this fissure the ice-floor streamed; and Rosset held my coat-tails while I made a few steps down the stream, when the fall became too rapid for further voluntary progress. I let down a stone for 18 feet, when it stuck fast, and would move neither one way nor the other. The upper wall of this fissure was clothed with moss-like ice, and ice of the prismatic structure,--with here and there large scythe-blades, as it were, attached by the sharp edge to the rock, and lying vertically with the heel outwards. One of these was 11 inches deep, from the heel to the rock, and only one-eighth of an inch thick at the thickest part.

The angle occupied by the cascade or column was the most striking. The base of the column was large, and apparently solid, like a smooth unbroken waterfall suddenly frozen. It fitted into the angle of the cave, and completely filled up the space between the contiguous walls. I commenced to chop with my axe, and before long found that this ice was hollow, though very thick; and when a sufficient hole was made for me to get through, I saw that what had looked like a column was in truth only a curtain of ice hung across the angle of the cave. Within the curtain the ice-floor still went on, streaming down at last into a fissure something like that in the other corner. The curtain was so low, that I was obliged to sit on the ice inside to explore; and after a foot or two of progress, the slope towards the fissure became sufficiently great to require steps to be cut. The stream of ice turned round a bend in the fissure, very near the curtain, and was lost to view; but Rosset stood by the hole through which I had passed--on the safer side of it--and despatched blocks of ice, which glided past me round the corner, and went whizzing on for a long time, eventually landing upon stones, and sometimes, we fancied, in water. It is very awkward work, sitting on a gentle slope of the smoothest possible ice, with a candle in one hand, and an axe in the other, cutting each step in front; especially when there is nothing whatever to hold by, and the slope is sufficient to make it morally certain that in case of a slip all must go together. Of course, a rope would have made all safe. When I groaned over the maire's obstinacy, Rosset asked what could possibly be the use of a rope, if I were to slip; and, to my surprise, I found that he had no idea what I wanted a rope for. When he learned that, had there been one, he would have played a large part in the adventure, and that he might have had me dangling over an ice-fall out of sight round the corner, he added his groans to mine, and would evidently have enjoyed it all very much. At the same time, he was prudent, and, as each block of ice made its final plunge, he told me that was what would happen to me if I went any farther: and, really, the pictures he drew of deep lakes of icy water and jagged points of rock, between which I must make my choice down there, were so unpleasant, that at last I desisted, and pushed myself up backwards, still in a sitting posture, calling Rosset and the maire the worst names I could feel justified in using. On the way, I found one of the large brown flies which we had seen in the Glacière of La Genollière, and in the Lower Glacière of the Pré de S. Livres.

Rosset now told me he was so cold he could stand it no longer; but, after a little pressure, and a declaration on my part that he should not have a candle for going up again, he consented to remain with me while I explored the remaining chamber, the lowest of all. This chamber may be called a continuation of the main passage. It is of about the same width as the highest of the three chambers, and the floor descends rapidly, the cold current of air becoming very strong and biting as we penetrated into the darkness. As the Genevese savans seemed to believe in 'cold currents' as the cause of underground ice, I was naturally anxious to see as much as possible of the state of this gallery, from which every particle of the current seemed to come. We very soon reached a narrow dark lake, and, exclaiming that here was ice again, I stepped, not on to, but into it, and found that it was water. When our solitary candle was brought to bear upon it, we saw that it was so clear as not in any way to impede our view, producing rather the effect of slightly-clouded spectacles upon the stones at the bottom. This lake filled up the whole breadth of the gallery, here perhaps 4 or 5 feet, and rapidly passed to the depth of a yard; but for a little distance there were unstable stones at one edge, and steps in the rock-wall, by which I could pass on still into the darkness, supported by an alpenstock planted in the water. The current of cold air blew along the surface of the water from the farther extremity of the gallery, wherever that might be. As far as our eyes could reach, we saw nothing but the black channel of water, with its precipitous sides passing up beyond our sight. It might have been possible to progress in a spread-eagle fashion, with one hand and one foot on each side; but a fall would have been so bitterly unpleasant, that I made a show of condescension in acceding to Rosset's request that I would not attempt such a thing. In the course of my return to the rocks where he stood, I involuntarily fathomed the depth of the lake, luckily in a shallower part, and was so much struck by the coldness of the water, that I left Rosset with the candle, and struggled up without a light to the place where we had left the maire, or rather to the bottom of the drop from the entrance-cave, to get the thermometer. The maire was sunning himself on the rock, out of reach of the cold current; but he came in, and let down the case, and I quickly rejoined the schoolmaster. At first, it would have been impossible to move about without a light; but our eyes had now become to some extent accustomed to the darkness, and I had learned the difficulties of the way.

When the thermometers were suspended in the water, Rosset asked how long they must stay there. I rashly answered, a quarter of an hour; on which he demanded indignantly whether I supposed he meant to stay in that cold for a quarter of an hour. He had now the candle in his own possession, and I was propped on a stone and an alpenstock in the lake, so he turned to go, vowing that he would leave me alone in the dark if I did not come out at once. There was no help for it, as the thermometer would have been of no use without a candle, and a step in the dark is not pleasant when all around is water, so I slowly drew up the thermometer and read 33° F. In making final arrangements for departure, I let it lie in the water for a few seconds longer, and it fell to 32½°; but Rosset would not stay a moment longer, and I was obliged to be content with that result. He made himself very easy about the matter, and said we must call it zero; and in the evening I heard him telling the maire that the greatest of the wonders he had missed, by his patriotic care for his neck, was a lake of water which did not freeze, though its temperature was zero (centigrade).

Among the stones at the bottom of this water, I saw here and there patches of a furry sort of ice. I have often watched the freezing of a rapid Scotch stream, where, in the swifter parts, the ice forms first at the bottom and gradually creeps up the larger stones till it appears on the surface, and becomes a nucleus, round which pieces of floating ice collect; and the substance in the glacière-lake had exactly the same appearance as the Scotch ground-ice. But it could not be the same thing in reality, for, as far as I understand the phenomenon of ground-ice, some disturbed motion of the water is necessary, to drive down below the surface the cold particles of water, which become ice the moment they strike upon any solid substance shaped like fractured stone;[^[75]] the specific gravity of freezing water being so much less than that of water at a somewhat higher temperature, that without some disturbing cause it would not sink to the bottom.[^[76]] So that it seems probable that the ice at the bottom of the lake was the remains of a solid mass, of which the greater part had been converted into water by some warm influence or other. We noticed that a little water trickled down among the stones which formed the slope of descent into the lowest gallery, so that perhaps the lake was a collection of water from all parts of the various ramifications of the fissure. Whence came the icy wind, it is impossible to say, without further exploration. It was satisfactory to me to find that the 'cold current' of the Genevese savans was thus associated with water, and not with ice, in the only cave in which I had detected its presence to any appreciable extent, the currents of the Glacière of Monthézy being of a totally different description.

When we reached the final rock, in ascending, I offered Rosset the promised back, but he got up well enough without it. Before leaving the entrance-cave, we inspected the thermometer which we had left to test the temperature of the current of air, and, to my surprise, found it standing at 48°. We saw, however, that it had been carelessly propped on a piece of rock which sheltered it from the influence of the current, so I exposed it during the time occupied in arranging the bag of tapes, &c., and it fell to 36°: whether it would have fallen lower, the impatience of Rosset has left me unable to say. If I can ever make an opportunity for visiting the Mont Parmelan again, I shall hope to take a cord, in order to investigate the mysterious corner of the triangular chamber; and I shall certainly make myself independent of shivering Frenchmen while I measure the temperature of the lake and the current of air. We met a man outside who said that he was employed by the owner, M. de Chosal of Annecy, to cut the ice; he had been down three times to the lowest gallery in different years, in the end of July, and had always found the same collection of water there. The glacière, he told us, was discovered about thirty years ago.

The maire had basked in the sun all the time we were down below, and he expressed himself as much pleased that we had found so much to interest us, in spite of the miscarriage of our efforts to reach the second glacière. We set off down the steep grass at a scrambling sliding run, against which I was speedily obliged to protest, explaining that a certain ugly inflammation above the left knee was becoming worse every other step, and as the leg must last three days longer, it would be as well to humour it. They saw the force of this reasoning, and we descended with much gravity till we came in sight of the Mairie, still half an hour off, when Rosset cried out that he smelled supper, and rushed off at an infectious pace down the remainder of the mountain-side.

We reached the Mairie at six o'clock, and sat down at once 'to eat something.' The first course was bread and kirsch; and when that was finished, six boiled eggs appeared, and a quart carafe of white wine. These having vanished, their place was taken by a dish of sodden cabbage, and another quart of wine; but, to save the credit of the maire and the schoolmaster, I will not say how often the former functionary descended to the cellar with a quart pitcher, with increasing impetuosity. Next came a dish of onions, with a pretence of mange-tout, broiled brown after boiling, and served in a compound fat; and then haricots with a like condiment, and with a flavour reminiscent of the previous course. There was some talk of a poulet; but the bird still lived, and the talk came to nothing. The dinner ended with the haricots, and we then relapsed into dessert, namely, bread and kirsch. The mayoress came in with the dessert, and sat on the end of the bench, below the hats and the bread-tin, eating the remaining onions off the dish with the spoon of nature.