Some caves, remarkable for an extremely low temperature even in summer, form natural ice-cellars, though unconnected with glaciers or snow mountains, and in latitudes and at altitudes where ice could not under ordinary circumstances be supposed to exist. Besides the interest attaching to these natural curiosities, these ice-caves are sometimes lucrative sources of revenue to their owners, or answer various purposes of use or comfort.

In hot summers, when the supplies of the artificial ice-houses fail in Geneva and Lausanne, the hotel-keepers have recourse to the stores laid up for them by nature in the ice-caves or glacières of St. Georges and St. Livres, situated in the canton of Vaud, on the slope of the Jura. Other ice-caves are made use of as dairies, or as storehouses for cheese; and the quarries of Niedermendig, near the small town of Andernach, on the Rhine, which are likewise remarkable for a glacial temperature, serve as excellent beer-cellars.

To Mr. Browne, who has made them his special study, we are indebted for an interesting account of the ice-caves of France and Switzerland,[[26]] which, as may naturally be expected in halls and galleries hung with drapery of transparent silver, not seldom offer scenes of beauty rivalling the most renowned stalactital grottoes.

LOWER GLACIÈRE OF ST. LIVRES.

In the Glacière of Grâce-Dieu, or La Baume, near Besançon, Mr. Browne was particularly struck with three large stalagmites of ice rising in a line across the middle of the cave. The central mass was remarkable only for its size, the girth being sixty-six and a half feet at some distance from the ice-floor, with which it blended; but nothing could be more strikingly lovely than the stalagmite to its right, owing to the good taste of some one, who had found that much ice was wont to accumulate on that spot, and had accordingly fixed the trunk of a small fir-tree, with the upper branches complete, to receive the water from the corresponding fissure in the roof. The consequence was that, while the actual tree had vanished from sight under its crystal covering, the ice with which it was incrusted showed every elegance of form which a mould so graceful could suggest, each twig of the different boughs becoming, to all appearance, a solid bar of frosted ice, from which complicated groups of icicles streamed down. But the mass to the left was the grandest and most beautiful of all. It consisted of two lofty heads, like weeping willows in Carrara marble, with three or four others less lofty, resembling a family group of lions’ heads in a subdued attitude of grief, richly decked with icy manes. Similar heads seemed to grow out here and there from the solid sides of the huge mass, which measured seventy-six and a half feet in girth about two feet from the floor. When this column was looked at from the side removed from the entrance to the cave, so that it stood in the centre of the light which poured down the long slope from the outer world, the transparency of the ice made the whole look as if it were set in a narrow frame of impalpable liquid blue—the effect of light penetrating through the mass at its extreme edges.

Other and no less striking beauties rewarded our subterranean explorer on his visit to the Schafloch or Trou-aux-Moutons, a vast ice-cave on the Rothhorn, in the canton of Berne, which takes its name from the fact that, when a sudden storm comes on, the sheep and goats make their way to it for shelter, though never going so far as the spot where the ice begins. On entering the cave the way lies over a wild confusion of loose masses of stone, which soon, however, begin to be intermingled with ice, until the latter entirely hides the naked rock under a crystal mantle.

‘On either side of the cave was a grand column of ice, forming the portal, as it were, through which we must pass to further beauties. The ice-floor rose to meet these columns in a graceful swelling curve, perfectly continuous, so that the general effect was that of two columns whose roots expanded and met in the middle of the cave. Convinced that internal investigations would prove interesting, I began to chop a hole in one of the pillars about two feet from the ground, and having made an entrance sufficiently large, proceeded to get into the cavity which presented itself. The flooring of the dome-shaped grotto in which I found myself was loose rock, at a level of about two feet below the surface of the ice-floor, on which my guide Christian still stood. The dome itself was not high enough to allow me to stand upright, and from the roof, principally from the central part, a complex mass of delicate icicles passed down to the floor, leaving a narrow burrowing passage round, which was itself invaded by icicles from the lower part of the sloping roof, and by stubborn stalagmites of ice rising from the floor. The details of this central cluster of icicles, and, in fact, of every portion of the interior of the strange grotto were exceedingly lovely, and I crushed with much regret, on hands and knees, through fair crystal forests and frozen dreams of beauty. In making the tour of this grotto, contorting my body like a snake, to get in and out among the ice-pillars, and do as little damage as might be, I yet, with all my care, was accompanied by the incessant shiver and clatter of breaking and falling ice. Having squeezed myself out again through the narrow hole, I now passed between the two gigantic columns, and found that the sea of ice became still broader and bolder, until we came to the edge of a glorious ice-fall, round and smooth and perfectly unbroken, passing down like the rapids of some river too deep for its surface to be disturbed, and plunging majestically into a dark gulf, of which we could see neither the roof nor the end.’

We will now follow Mr. Browne to the Upper Glacière of St. Livres, where the interesting discovery was made that the ice-stream which filled the cave, instead of terminating with the wall of rock at its end, turned off to the right, and was lost in darkness. By tying a candle to a long stick, and thrusting it down the slope of ice, it was further found that the stream passed down at a very steep incline, and poured under a narrow and low arch in the wall of the cave, beyond which nothing could be seen. Steps were now cut down the slope by one of the party, who was carefully let down, and, his work being completed, the others followed him through the arch—a rather awkward undertaking, for, on pushing through, their breasts were pressed on to the ice, while their backs scraped against the rock which formed the roof.

‘As soon as this trough was passed,’ says Mr. Browne, ‘the ice spread out like a fan, and finally landed us in a second cavern, 72 feet long by 36 feet broad, to which this was the only entrance. The breadth of the fan at the bottom was 27 feet, and near the archway a very striking column poured from a vertical fissure in the wall, and joined the main stream. The fissure was partially open to the cave, and showed the solid round column within the rock: this column measured 18½ feet in circumference, a little below the point where it became free of the fissure, and it had a stream of ice 22 feet long pouring from its base. The peculiar structure of the ice gave the whole mass the appearance of coursing down very rapidly, as if the water had been frozen while thus moving, and had not therefore ceased so to move.... At the farthest end of the cave, a lofty dome opened up in the roof, beneath which a very lovely cluster of columns had grouped itself, formed of clear porcelain-like ice, and fretted and festooned with the utmost delicacy, as if Andersen’s Ice Maiden had been there in one of her amiable moods and had built herself a palace.’