d by what he saw, that he fled with
precipitation from the cave, and we eventually found him asleep under a
bush on the rocks above. In reaching the farther side of the pit, we
crossed unwittingly an ice-bridge formed by a transverse pit or tunnel
in the ice, which opened into the pit we were examining. The maire
afterwards promised to rail off all that end of the glaciere, and forbid
his workmen to venture upon it. Considering that the hole itself was
only opened two years before by the fall of a column, and has already
undergone such changes, I shall be surprised if the ice-bridge, and all
that part on which we lay to fathom the pit, does not fall in before
very long; and then, by means of steps and ropes and ladders, it may be
possible to reach the entrance to the lower cave, 190 feet below the
surface of the earth. May I be there to see![72]

The left side of the glaciere, near the entrance, was occupied by a
columnar cascade, behind which I forced a passage by chopping away some
lovely ornaments of ice. Here also the solid ground-ice falls away a
little under the surface, leaving a cavern 8 or 9 feet deep, on the rock
side of which every possible glacial fantasy was to be found. The
stalactites here presented the peculiar prismatic structure so often
noticed; but on the more exposed side of the column they were tipped
with limpid ice, free from all apparent external or internal lines. This
reminded me of what we had observed in the Glaciere of La Genolliere,
namely, that the surface-lines tended to disappear under thaw; so I cut
a piece of prismatic ice and put it in my mouth. In a short time it
became perfectly limpid, and on breaking it up I could discover no signs
of prism. On some parts of the floor of the glaciere, the ice was
apparently unprismatic, generally in connection with running water or
other marks of thaw; but, to my surprise, I found that it split into
prisms very readily.

The maire could not understand how it was that, after a winter
especially severe, as that of 1863-4 had been, there should be even less
ice than in the preceding summer, and we could see the marks of last
year's cutting, down to the edge of the _moulin_. He said that they had
never before cut down in that direction; but in the summer of 1863 they
had been so much struck by the clearness of the ice which formed the
floor, that they had cut it freely, and removed a large quantity. This,
I believe, was the cause of the absence of a