uire a considerable time, and much care and labour, to unfurl
a lumbering instrument of that description. He had the best of the
tale-contest with Renaud in the end, for he had himself been grazed by
a bull which came up with him at the moment when he sprang into a
tree.
Before very long we reached a little kennel-like hut of boughs, which no
decent dog would have lived in, and no large dog could have entered, and
from this we drew a charcoal-burner. No, he said, he did not know the
glaciere; he had heard that one had been discovered near there, and he
had spent hours in searching for it without success. A herdsman on his
way from one pasturage to another could give no better help, and we
began to despair, till at length Louis desired us to halt in a place
sheltered from the rain, while he prosecuted the search alone. We had
abundant time for observing that, like other leafy places sheltered from
the rain, our resting-place was commanded by huge and frequent drops of
water; but at last a joyful _Jodel_ announced the success of the
accomplice, and we ran off to join him.
At first sight there was very little to see. Louis had lately been
enunciating an opinion that the cave was not worth visiting, and I now
felt inclined to agree with him. The general plan appeared to be much
the same as in the one we had just left, but the scale was
considerably smaller. The pit was not nearly so deep or so large, and,
owing to the falling-in of rock and earth at one side, the snow was
approached by a winding path with a gradual fall. As soon as the snow
was reached, the slope became very steep, and led promptly to an arch
in the rock, where the stream of ice began. The cave being shallow,
the stream soon came to an end, and, unlike that in the lower
glaciere, it filled the cave down to the terminal wall, and did not
fill it up to the left wall. Here the ground of the cave was visible,
strewn with the remains of columns, and showing the thickness of the
bottom of the stream to be about 6 feet only. The arch of entrance had
evidently been almost closed by a succession of large columns, but
these had succumbed to the rain and heat to which they had been
exposed by their position.
The left side of the cave, in descending, that is the west side, was
comparatively light, being in the line from the arch; but the other side
was quite dark, and after a time we found that the ice-stream, instead
of terminating as we had supposed with the wa
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