dry.

In one of the fissures there was a patch of what is known as
sweating-stone, [5] with globules of water oozing out, and standing
roundly upon it: the globules were not frozen. This stone was
exceedingly hard, and defied all our efforts to break off a specimen,
but at last we got two small pieces, hard and heavy, and wrapped them
in paper; ten weeks after, we found them of course quite dry, and
broke them easily, small as they were, with our fingers. The fissure
from which the shortest of the four columns came was full of gnats, as
were also several crevices in the walls of the cave, especially in the
lowest part; and we found a number of large red-brown flies, [6]
nearly an inch long, running rapidly on the ice and stones, after the
fashion of the flies with which trout love best to be taken. The
central parts of the cave, where the roof is high, were in a state
provincially known as 'sloppy,' and drops of water fell now and then
from above, either splashing on wet stones, or hollowing out basins in
the remaining ice, or, sometimes, shrewdly detecting the most
sensitive spot in the back of the human neck. We placed one of
Casella's thermometers on a piece of wood on one of the wet stones,
clear of the ice, and it soon fell to 34 deg.. Probably the temperature
had been somewhat raised by the continued presence of three human
beings and two lighted candles in the small cavern; and, at any rate,
the cold of two degrees above freezing was something very real on a
hot summer's day, and told considerably upon my sisters, so that we
were compelled to beat a retreat,--not quite in time, for one of our
party could not effect a thaw, even by stamping about violently in the
full afternoon sun.

While we were in the cave, we noticed that the surfaces of the columns
were covered by very irregular lines, marked somewhat deeply in the
ice, and dividing the surface into areas of all shapes, a sort of
network, with meshes of many different shapes and sizes. These areas
were smaller towards the edges of the columns; the lines containing
them were not, as a rule, straight lines, and almost baffled our
efforts to count them, but, to the best of my belief, there were
meshes with three, four, and up to eight sides. The column which
stood clear of the rock was composed of very limpid ice, without
admixture of air; but the cascades were interpenetrated by veins of
looser white ice, and, where the white ice came, the surface lines
seem