ccordingly 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 icy covering, excepting on one side
where a slight investigation betrayed its presence, the mass of ice
showed every possible fantasy of form which a mould so graceful could
suggest. At the base, it was solid, with a circumference of 37 feet.
The huge column, which had collected round the trunk of the fir-tree,
branched out at the top into all varieties of eccentricity and beauty,
each twig of the different boughs becoming, to all appearance, a solid
bar of frosted ice, with graceful curve, affording a point of
suspension for complicated groups of icicles, which streamed down side
by side with emulous loveliness. In some of the recesses of the
column, the ice assumed a pale blue colour; but as a rule it was white
and very hard, not so regularly prismatic as the ice described in
former glacieres, but palpably crystalline, showing a structure not
unlike granite, with a bold grain, and with a large predominance of
the glittering element. But the westernmost mass 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. The girth was
76-1/2 feet, measured about 2 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 brought it to
pass that the whole seemed set in a narrow frame of impalpable liquid
blue, the effect of light penetrating through the mass at its extreme
edges. The only means of determining the height of this column was by
tying a stone to the end of a string, and lodging it on the highest
head; but this was not an easy process, as I was naturally anxious not
to injure the delicate beauty which made that head one of the
loveliest things conceivable; and each careful essay with the stone
seemed to involve as much responsibility as taking a shot at a hostile
wicket, in a crisis of the game, instead of returning the ball in the
conv