inutes farther to the north-west, at an
elevation of about 2,800 feet above the lake, or 4,000 feet above the
sea.[4] A rough mountain road, leading over an undulating expanse of
grass, passes narrowly between two small clumps of trees, each
surrounded by a low circular wall, the longer diameter of the
enclosure on the south side of the road being 60 feet. In this
enclosure is a natural pit, of which the north side is a sheer rock,
of the ordinary limestone of the Jura, with a chasm almost from the
top; while the south side is less steep, and affords the means of
scrambling down to the bottom, where a cave is found at the foot of
the chasm, passing under the road. The floor of this small but
comparatively lofty cave is 52 feet below the surface of the earth,
and slopes away rapidly to the west, where, by the help of candles,
the rock which forms the wall is seen to stop short of the floor,
leaving an entrance 2 or 3 feet high to an inner cave--the glaciere.
The roof of this inner cave rises slightly, and its floor falls, so
that there is a height of about 6 feet inside, excepting where a large
open fissure in the roof passes high up towards the world above. At
one end, neither the roof nor the floor slopes much, and in this part
of the cave the height is less than 3 feet.

It would be very imprudent to go straight into an ice-cave after a long
walk on a hot summer's day, so we prepared to dine under the shade of
the trees at the edge of the pit, and I went down into the cave for a
few moments to get a piece of ice for our wine. My first impression was
that the glaciere was entirely destroyed, for the outer cave was a mere
chaos of rock and stones; but, on further investigation, it turned out
that the ruin had not reached the inner cave. In our previous visit we
had noticed a natural basin of some size and depth among the trees on
the north side of the road, and we now found that the chaos was the
result of a recent falling-in of this basin; so that from the bottom of
the first cave, standing as it were under the road, we could see
daylight through the newly-formed hole.

The total length of the floor of the inner cave, which lies north-east
and south-west, is 51 feet; and of this floor a length of about 37 feet
was more or less covered with ice, the greatest breadth of the ice being
within an inch or two of 11 feet. Excepting in the part of the cave
already mentioned as being less than 3 feet high, we found the floor n