not easy work; so when I came within 3 or 4 feet of the rock, I forgot
the rope, and set off for a short glissade. Christian, of course,
thought something was wrong, and very properly put a prompt strain upon
the rope, which reduced his Herr to a spread-eagle sort of condition, in
which it was difficult to explain matters, so as to procure a release.
When that was accomplished, I saw it would be easy to reach the point
where the ice met the wall, so I called to Christian to come down, which
he did in an unpremeditated, avalanche fashion; and then, by cutting
steps here and there, and making use of odd points of rock, we skirted
down the edge of the great fall, and reached at last the lower regions.

When I came to read Dufour's account of his visit in 1822, I found that
the ice must have increased very much since his time. He uses
sufficiently large words, speaking of the _vaste, horrible et pourtant
magnifique_--of the _horreur du sejour_, and the _grandeur des demeures
souterraines_; but he only calls the glorious ice-fall a _plan incline_,
and says that the whole was less remarkable for the amount of ice, than
for the characteristics indicated by the words I have quoted. He says
that it required _une assez forte dose de courage_ to slip down to the
stone of which I have spoken; the fact being that at the time of my
visit it would have been impossible to do so with any chance of stopping
oneself, for the flat surface of the stone was all but even with the
ice. M. Soret, who saw the cave in 1860, determined that cords were then
absolutely necessary for the descent, which he did not attempt; and the
only Englishman I have met who has seen this cave, tells me that he and
his party went no farther than the edge of the fall.[62] Probably each
year's accumulation on the upper floor of ice has added to the height
and rapidity of the fall; but at any rate, when Dufour was there, _des
militaires_--as he dashingly tells--were not to be stopped, and he and
his party--such of them as had not been already stopped by the
precipices outside--let themselves slip down to the stone, and thence
descended as we did.

We soon found that the larger ice-fall looked extremely grand when seen
from below, and that in a modified form it reached far down into the
lower cave, and terminated in a level sea of ice; but, before making any
further investigations into its size, we pressed on to look for the end
of the cave. This soon appeared, and as