They took us to the fissured rock mentioned above; and when we looked
down into the fissures, we saw that some of them were filled at the
bottom with ice. They were not the ordinary fissures, like the crevasses
of a glacier, but rather disconnected slits in the surface, opening into
larger chambers in the heart of the rock, where the ice lay. In one part
of this curious district the surface sank considerably, and showed
nothing but a tumbled collection of large stones and rocks, piled in a
most disorderly manner. By examining the neighbourhood of the larger of
these rocks, we found a burrow, down which one of the men and I made our
way, and thus, after some windings in the interior, reached a point from
which we could descend to the ice. The impression conveyed to my mind
by the whole appearance of the rock and ice was not unlike that of the
domes in the Glaciere of Monthezy; only that now the lower part of the
dome was filled with ice, and we stood in the upper part. There were two
or three of these domes, communicating one with another, and in all I
found abundant signs of the prismatic structure, though no columns or
wall-decoration remained. My sisters were accomplished in the art of
burrowing, but they did not care to come down, and we soon rejoined
them, spending a little time in letting down lighted _bougies_ into the
various domes and fissures, in order to study the movements of the air,
but our experiments did not lead to much.

The landlord had evidently not believed in the existence of ice in
summer, and his first thought was to take some home to his wife, to
prove that we had reached the glaciere and had found ice: such at least
were the reasons he gave, but evidently his soul was imbued with a deep
obedience to that better half, and the offering of a block of ice was
suggested by a complication of feelings. When we reached the _auberge_
again, we found the rejected guide still there, and more unstable than
before. The general impression on his mind seemed to be that he had been
wronged, and had forgiven us. In our absence he had been meditating upon
the glaciere, and his imagination had brought him to a very exalted idea
of its wonders. Whereas, in the former part of the day, he had stoutly
asserted that no cord could possibly be necessary, he now vehemently
affirmed that if I had but taken him as guide, he would have let me down
into holes 40 metres deep, where I should have seen such things as man
had nev