want of table apparatus, we placed the pot of caille on a
broken wall, and speared the nuggets with our pocket-knives.

After the meal, the two Frenchmen found themselves wet and exceedingly
cold; for Frenchmen have not yet learned the blessing of flannel shirts
under a broiling sun. They set to work to dry themselves after an
original fashion. The fire was little more than a collection of
smouldering embers, confined within three stone walls about a foot high;
so they took each a one-legged stool--_chaises des vaches_, or _chaise
des montagnes_--and attached themselves to the stools by the usual
leathern bands round the hips; then they cautiously planted the prods of
the stools in the middle of the embers, maintaining an unstable
equilibrium by resting their own legs on the top of the walls. Here they
sat, smoking and being smoked, till they were dry and warm. Of course,
in case of a slip or an inadvertent movement, they would have gone
sprawling into the fire. A well-known Swiss botanist, who has seen many
strange sleeping-places in the course of sixty years of flower-hunting
in the mountains of Vaud and Valais, has told me that on one occasion he
had reached with great difficulty the only chalet in the neighbourhood
of his day's researches, at a late hour of the night, the whole mountain
being soaked with rain. It was a little upland chalet, which the people
had deserted for the autumn and winter; and meantime a mud avalanche had
taken possession, and covered the floor to a depth of several inches. No
plank was to be found for lying on; but he discovered a broken
one-legged stool, and on this he sat and slept, propped as well as might
be in a corner. It is difficult to say which would be worse--a fall from
the stool by daylight into the embers of a wood fire, or the shuddering
slimy waking about midnight, after a nod more vigorous than the rest, to
find oneself plunged in eight cold inches of soft mud.

About half an hour beyond the chalet, we found the mouth of the
glaciere, on a large plateau almost bare of vegetation, and showing the
live rock at the surface. They told me that in a strong winter there
would be an average of 12 feet of snow on the ground here.[70] The
glaciere itself is approached by descending one side of a deep pit,
whose circumference is larger than that of any other of the
pit-glacieres I have seen. A few yards off there is a smaller shaft in
the rock, which we afterwards found to communicate