SUBTERRANEAN ICE IN KING’S RAVINE.

Subterranean ice was brought to my notice by a mere accident, late in the month of September, 1877, while on a descent of King’s Ravine, on Mount Adams, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We had just descended the rock wall of the mountain and had reached the head of the gorge, when my companion, Mr. Charles E. Lowe, the well-known Appalachian guide of Randolph, suddenly said to me, “Would you like a piece of ice? I can get you some presently.” I answered, “Certainly,” wondering where he would find any. When we got among the big boulders, which form so rough a path for the traveler at the bottom of the ravine, Mr. Lowe climbed down under one of the biggest, and presently reappeared with a good sized lump of ice. I was much impressed at finding ice at the end of the summer in this gorge, when for months past no ice or snow had been visible on the surrounding mountains. I noticed also the peculiar, flaky formation of the ice, and saw at once that it was something new to me, and in fact it was a piece of what I have since learned to know as “prismatic ice.”

GLACIÈRE NEAR BRISONS.

In the summer of the year 1880, I traveled through the Alps, with a friend from Philadelphia. On the 17th of September, we drove from Geneva to Bonneville. Thence we started on foot without a guide, and as a result got lost in the woods, from which we only extricated ourselves at nightfall. After retracing our steps to Bonneville, we were glad to find a man to show us the way we should have taken, and finally reached the little village of Brisons in France, where we slept. The next day we took a guide and made our way across the mountains to Annecy, at one spot going out of our direct route to see a place spoken of by the natives as a glaciÈre. It was a little pit, and at the base of one side thereof was the mouth of a small cave into which we could not see any distance. At the bottom of the pit lay a mass of dirty snow and ice to which we did not descend, as the sides of the pit were sheer and smooth, and there was no ladder. This pit seemed to be more of the nature of a gully filled with winter snow, than a true rock cave containing ice.

THE GLACIÈRE DE L’HAUT-D’AVIERNOZ.

Three days after this, on Tuesday, the 21st of September, 1880, we visited the two largest glaciÈres on the Mont Parmelan, near Annecy, France. At Annecy we inquired at the hotel for a man who knew the Mont Parmelan; and, after finding one, we made our way to Les Villaz, where we spent the night in an auberge. Our companion was an odd personage. He was small, about fifty years of age, and looked meek, crushed and hungry. He wore a long black frock coat and black trousers, thin boots and a linen shirt, certainly not the ideal outfit for a cave explorer. Under his care we started early in the morning and toiled up a mountain path some eight hundred or a thousand meters,[1] through woods and pastures, to the higher plateau of Mont Parmelan, in which was situated the first glaciÈre. This was in a great pit, at the bottom of which, on one side, was a big cave. On the side of the pit opposite to the opening, there was a steep rock slope, forty or fifty meters long, whose lower portion was covered with snow. Down this slope we descended with but little difficulty, reaching at the bottom an almost level ice floor which spread over the entire cave and was formed throughout of thick, solid ice. A second and much smaller pit in the roof of the cave opened directly over the ice floor; and under this pit rose a small cone of ice, some two meters high, the only one in this glaciÈre.

The glaciÈre itself was approximately round in shape, and some twenty meters in diameter. At one place the rock wall was broken and we could look into a much smaller inner cave or chamber. Into this we could not penetrate on account of a long, narrow crack or hole which yawned in the ice floor for a distance of some five or six meters and continued through the opening into the second chamber. We tried to cut our way along the side of the hole, but had to give it up, finding the ice too hard and our time too short. The crack or hole, whose sides were solid ice, proved conclusively that the ice in this glaciÈre was many meters in thickness, for we could look a long way down into the hole, certainly for ten or twelve meters, until the ice sides disappeared in darkness, without any visible bottom. The hole cannot be spoken of as a crevasse, for, besides not looking like a crevasse, it was certainly formed by other causes than those which form the crevasses in glaciers, since there is, as a rule, no perceptible movement in subterranean ice. Doubtless, the hole was due to the drainage of the cave, which undoubtedly passed off through the hole. There may be, nevertheless, some little motion in the ice of this glaciÈre, for it is evident that it is fed principally directly by the winter snows; which, whether as frozen or melted snow, descend gradually, by the force of gravitation, from the slope of the pit into the glaciÈre.

As for any possibility of this great mass of ice melting away and forming again in any one year, it passes belief; there must be at least the cubic contents of a dozen ordinary houses in the cave, and such a mass could hardly be destroyed or formed again in any such short space of time as a fall or spring. This is, therefore, probably a permanent or perennial glaciÈre.

THE GLACIÈRE DE CHAPUIS.

Starting out from the GlaciÈre de l’Haut-d’Aviernoz we walked across the plateau of the Mont Parmelan, en route for the second glaciÈre. This plateau is a curious rock formation, consisting of what the natives call lapiaz, which might be translated “stone-heaps.” The plateau is full of great projecting rocks; and myriads of cracks and crevices everywhere rend the surface, and over these crevices one sometimes has to jump. Still, I do not remember any particular difficulty. It was certainly not nearly as bad walking as the taluses of loose rocks one meets at the base of many mountains.

Our guide led us for about an hour across the plateau in a southerly direction, and then, looking over the side of the Parmelan, with a sweep of the arm covering south, west and north, he told us that the glaciÈre lay between those points, but he did not know exactly where. This seemed a rather hopeless prospect, so, as we had no clue to the whereabouts of our prospective hole, we descended to a couple of chÂlets we saw some two hundred meters below, but which at least were in the direction of Annecy. We followed a goat-herd’s path which led to the chÂlets from the plateau, one of those dangerous grass tracks, where nothing would be easier than to make a slip, and where a bad slip might have unpleasant results. This is, however, just the kind of place where every one is particularly careful not to slip. We were careful and so reached the chÂlets all right, and there we found a strong, intelligent boy, who at once pointed out the place where the glaciÈre was, about half way up the slope we had just come down. So we took him with us, leaving our guide at the chÂlets to await our return.

The entrance to the glaciÈre was in a wall of rock, set at an angle of some thirty-five degrees; at the bottom of this there was some grass. An easy chimney some fifteen meters high led up to the glaciÈre. Up this chimney we climbed. At the top we entered a little cave about two meters deep, by a sort of portal about two meters wide. The cave made an elbow to the right, and passing this we found that it turned to the left and pointed directly into the mountain. The rock went down vertically in front of us, but the boy said we could get down, so having first lowered a candle by a string to see the depth, which turned out to be a perpendicular drop of some four or five meters, with the help of the rope we all climbed down. We were already almost entirely away from the daylight and a few steps took us into complete darkness, except for the light we had from the candle each of us held in his hand.

The fissure led straight into the mountain. It was a couple of meters wide at places, and there we moved along the bottom. In one place it narrowed below to a wedge, and there we progressed either by climbing along one side or by placing one foot on one side and the other foot on the other. The fissure led downwards as well as inwards. It would have been nothing in daylight to go through it; but in the semi-darkness it was not easy.

After a descent of some twenty-five meters or thereabouts, we arrived at the glaciÈre, and I have certainly never seen a weirder place. There was a great arched rock dome, perhaps six meters in height, and some twelve in diameter; the floor was a sheet of smooth, slippery ice, at one end curling over, gently at first, afterwards more steeply, to a lower depth; and on the sides were seven or eight ice columns streaming from cracks in the rocks to the floor. Each of these columns was some three or four meters high, and, small at the top and in the middle, spread out at the base into the shape of fans. In the dim candle light and the cold damp atmosphere, the columns loomed up like so many ghosts, and the landscape impression was strange and solemn. The air here seemed perfectly still.

There was another curiosity. The fissure we had come down, at this point some three meters wide, was filled, just beyond the glaciÈre, with pure, transparent water, which formed a little lake: this was perhaps one meter deep, and extended across the fissure, barring further progress. It certainly seems strange that in the same cavern, under nearly the same conditions of temperature, there should be one place covered with a flooring of ice and another filled with water. The explanation, however, is perhaps not far to seek. Over the lake there was a distinct draught of air. The draught probably melts the ice in summer, if indeed it does not prevent any from forming in winter. There are, so far, no winter observations reported of this cave, yet it would seem to be one which would well repay the trouble.

THE GLACIÈRE DE CHAUX-LES-PASSAVANT.

On the 17th of August, 1894, my brother and I arrived at BesanÇon, the Vesontio of the Romans, bent on seeing the GlaciÈre de Chaux-les-Passavant or de la GrÂce-Dieu, which is not far distant from the town. The hotel we stopped at was pretty bad; the beds were surmounted with those old-fashioned curtains which were of use before the invention of glass windows, but which now only serve to exclude air and ventilation. However, I learnt something of the manners and customs of the country, for on getting down at six o’clock the next morning for breakfast, the first question the waiter asked was: Quel vin monsieur prendra-t-il? At seven o’clock we sallied forth in a little open one-horse victoria, with a dull gray sky overhead. BesanÇon is well down in a valley, so the first five miles of the road were a slow, gradual rise to the surrounding levels. The scenery as we drove along reminded us of Turner’s pictures: distant vistas of hills and valleys with factories blowing off their smoke and with tumble-down old houses ensconced in picturesque nooks, just those long-distance effects that Turner loved to paint and which, for some reason, the artists of the present generation have generally neglected and usually speak of as unpaintable or unpicturesque. There was a row of trees, the whole way, on each side of the road, a bit of practical forestry, the wisdom of which it would be well for Americans to recognize. After our poor horse had pulled us up the long hills, we had an almost level road running in a straight line as far as the eye could see. We saw at least a hundred little hawks, who live on field mice and other rodents, and whose preservation is another evidence of French wisdom. The last four miles of the drive was up a ravine in the woods, near the beginning of which we passed the Trappist convent of la GrÂce-Dieu.

Opposite the entrance of the glaciÈre, there is a little restaurant where the peasants come to dance and picnic, and where the few travellers who get to these parts, can obtain a tolerable dÉjeuner. They keep a fair vin du pays there, and we had some trouble on the way home in consequence. Our driver, a talkative specimen of the genus and an old soldier of Bourbaki’s, told us, on the way out, many things about BesanÇon during the Franco-German war and of the retreat of the French army into Switzerland; but on the way home, he showed that he evidently was not a member of the blue ribbon army. He first seemed desirous of not taking us back to BesanÇon, preferring to go in the other direction towards Bale; and afterwards he evinced a violent inclination to go to sleep. We thought we should have to request him to change seats with us, and drive back ourselves, but we obviated the difficulty by plying him with questions as soon as he began to nod on his box. Eventually, we reached BesanÇon all right, only once bumping a passing cart, and only once nearly capsizing into a ditch. If Americans can learn some points from Europeans about forestry, I think the latter might get some equally valuable information from us concerning the use of water, externally and internally.

The good lady at the restaurant acts the part of the old-fashioned cave dragon, and we had to appease her by handing over four sous as a preliminary to exploration. She also had a sign up, saying that no one is allowed to break off or take away any ice, which must sadly interfere with the tourists’ privilege of bringing away specimens.

The entrance of the glaciÈre was surrounded by woods, which formed a natural rampart to anything like wind. As we stood facing the glaciÈre a great pit opened before us, with a slope about one hundred and thirty-five meters long leading to the bottom. This slope is at first gentle in its gradient, but lower down it steepens to an angle of some thirty degrees so that we were glad to resort to the trail which descends in regular Alpine zigzags. In one place, on the right hand, there were the remains of a stone wall with a door, and local tradition relates that in former times there was a sort of fortified habitation there, which was used in war times as a place of retreat. The lower part of the slope is covered by a protecting roof of rock which, thin at the rim where it is edged with forest, gradually slopes downward overhead so that at the mouth of the glaciÈre we looked back and up what might be described as an immense tunnel. The lower part of the slope was a mixture of broken rocks, mud and ice: the last, however, seemed to be all on the surface, although it was impossible to determine whether it went to any depth.

At the base of the tunnel we found ourselves on the threshold of an immense, almost circular cave, with a diameter of some fifty meters, rising overhead into a regular vault or dome about twenty-seven meters in height. The entrance to the cave is so large that plenty of daylight is admitted, and the whole cave easily examined. The rocks are of a yellowish brown hue, and I could not help thinking of Nibelheim in Richard Wagner’s Rheingold.

The bottom of the cave was entirely covered with a flooring of ice. How thick this flooring was there was no means of judging, as there were no holes, but it must have been at least two or three meters thick in places. At the back of the cavern, directly facing the entrance, one magnificent frozen water fall streamed from a fissure. It was perhaps five meters high, and began to take the fan shape from its origin. The base was about four meters wide, and did not rest on the ice floor, but on a sloping rock extending out from the side of the cave.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of all, were six or seven great ice stalagmites, shaped like cones or rough pyramids, which rose on the floor of the cave. One of these was at least five meters in diameter and six in height, and seemed perfectly solid. In the case of two of the others, however, the cones were broken on one side, revealing in each the stem and branches of a young pine tree. These evidently had been planted in the ice and round them the columns had grown. Whether all the ice cones were thus artificial in their origin I could not determine, but it seemed probable that they were the result of years of undisturbed accretion and growth. In both the cones where the break on the side gave a view into the interior, the dark blue-green color of deep glacier crevasses was present.

A pool of water, perhaps thirty centimeters in depth and three or four meters in diameter, lay at one place on the ice floor. The whole cave was damp and the ice in places decidedly slushy, in fact all the signs showed that it was thawing. In the case of this glaciÈre as well as in those of the Mont Parmelan, it seemed clear that it must be in the winter months that the formation of ice takes place.

DÓBSINA JEGBARLANG.

The cavern of DÓbsina, in the Carpathian Mountains, is easily reached either from PoprÁd to the north, or from DÓbsina to the south. The hotel at PoprÁd is better, however, than the inn at DÓbsina, where my brother and I spent two nights. It was decidedly primitive. The food was not so bad, but the pigs ran round in the courtyard, and one morning a gypsy band woke us at half-past three o’clock by playing in front of our windows, in dreadful wailing tones, which were most irritating at that hour. At the proper time, however, Hungarian gypsy music,—despite the fact that none of the players ever seem to look at the leader, and that each man appears to play the tune he likes the best,—is strangely fascinating.

DÓbsina itself lies in a hollow, surrounded with well-wooded hills, the general appearance much resembling some of the valleys of the White Mountains of New Hampshire. My brother and I started from DÓbsina on the morning of the 27th of July, 1895, at half-past seven o’clock, in a little open carriage with excellent horses and a Hungarian driver in national costume. He was a nice fellow, but he did not understand a word of German. The road reminded us of some of our own mountain roads, as it was rough, full of holes and partly washed away by the rains. We first ascended to the crest of the surrounding hills and then descended to the Stracena Thal, a wild limestone valley covered with fine forest. Two hours and a half driving landed us at the hotel-restaurant near the cave, at which I should certainly stop on another visit. It was half an hour’s stroll thence, through beautiful woods, to the cavern’s entrance. Northwards in the distance the TÁtra Range was visible, a set of sharp bare rock peaks, at whose base, ensconced in pine forests, is situated the famous Hungarian summer resort of TÁtra FÜred, which much resembles Bar Harbor.

The entrance to the cavern is enclosed by a fence with a gate, and here the DÓbsina people have a high tariff and take toll from tourists. At the gate, we waited for half an hour, until a sufficient number of persons had arrived to form a party. This mode of visiting the cave rather detracts from the pleasure, even though it does away with all difficulty and makes the beauties of DÓbsina accessible to everyone. It was also necessary to wait long enough to cool off thoroughly before entering, on account of the icy air of the cavern, where heavy winter clothes are indispensable.

The entrance to DÓbsina faces nearly due north. It is small, perhaps two meters wide and three meters high, and is perfectly sheltered from any wind. The sudden drop in temperature at the entrance was startling; in fact it was the most extreme change I have noticed in any cave. Within the length of an ordinary room, say in a distance of five meters, we passed from an extremely hot summer morning to the chill of a mid-winter afternoon. A slight air current, perhaps, issued from the entrance, as we observed a faint mist there. At the rock portal there was ice on the rocks overhead, and underfoot was the beginning of the huge mass of ice which almost fills the cavern. A descent down eighteen wooden steps landed us at the beginning of a great ice floor, in what is called the Grosser Saal. It is a magnificent cave. The floor is a sheet or rather a mass of solid ice, the surface of which is level enough in one place to permit of skating; in other spots it is sloping and covered with small ice hillocks. The ice is solid throughout, without any holes or cracks. Several fissure columns stream to the floor from cracks in the sides. Joining the roof to the floor are numerous big ice stalactites, which form frozen pillars and columns. These are from eight to eleven meters in height, and some two to three meters in average breadth and width. Nearly translucent, they are covered with all sorts of icy ornaments hanging about them in tufts and fringes; they are beautiful in their shapes, as well as in their white and blue colors. One of these columns is called the Brunnen, because until about ten years ago, a small stream dribbled continuously from the roof and cut a channel across the ice floor; but now the stream has solidified into the pillar, and the channel is filled up, although it can still be traced in the ice.

The cavern is lighted by electricity, which has the merit, even if it brings in an element of artificiality, of clearly revealing one of the chief glories of DÓbsina. This is the rime or hoar frost, which in the shape of ice or snow crystals, covers the entire limestone roof, and, reflecting the electric light, shines like frosted silver. Some of these frost crystals seem to be precipitated to the floor, and in one place I found a small sheet of them, perhaps two meters in width each way, which looked and felt like genuine snow. The general color effect of all this upper cave is white, although there is some blue in the ice, and gray and brown in the rocks and shadows. It would not be much of a misnomer to call DÓbsina “the great white cave.”

The ice extended to the sides of the cave except in two places. Here there were holes in the ice, bridged by low rock arches. We passed through one of these and descended by a wooden staircase some eighty steps, afterwards returning up through the other arch by another staircase. At the bottom we stood in a magnificent gallery named the Korridor, formed by a solid wall of ice on one side and by a wall of limestone rock on the other. The ice wall is the lower portion of the ice floor; the rock wall is the continuation of the roof. For the entire distance the ice wall rises almost perpendicularly some fifteen meters in height, while the rock wall arches overhead.

The bottom of the Korridor was filled with blocks of fallen limestone, through which any water drains off, and on which there was a wooden walk, so that we circled round the ice with the greatest ease. At one place on the limestone wall hung a cluster of big icicles, which, from their shape really deserved the name they bear, of the Orgel. At another place a hole, some six or seven meters deep, was hewn, in the form of a small chamber, directly into the ice mass. This is the Kapelle, where we performed our devotions by leaving our visiting cards on the floor. Near the middle of the Korridor the ice mass bulges out and extends to the limestone wall, breaking the whole Korridor into two parts, the western portion about eighty meters, and the eastern about one hundred and twenty meters long. This necessitated cutting a tunnel about eight meters long in the ice to get through. The color of the Korridor is a darkish gray and is much more sombre than that of the Grosser Saal. A remarkable feature of the ice wall is the fact that distinct bands of stratification are visible in the ice in many places. Why the Korridor is not filled up with ice and why the ice is perpendicular for such a distance are questions I am unable to answer satisfactorily; but it is probable that the temperature of the rock walls is sufficiently high to prevent ice from forming in winter or to melt it in summer if it does form in winter.

The air in DÓbsina seemed still, and scarcely felt damp. In one or two places in the Grosser Saal there was a slight sloppiness, showing incipient signs of thaw. In the Korridor it was freezing hard.

THE KOLOWRATSHÖHLE.

The KolowratshÖhle is situated on the north slope of the Untersberg, near Salzburg, at an altitude of 1391 meters. My brother and I visited it on the 2d of August, 1895. We had one of the patented guides of the district, Jacob Gruber by name, in regular Tyrolese dress, with gray jacke and black chamois knee breeches. We left Salzburg in the early morning in an einspÄnner and drove to the foot of the Untersberg in about an hour, whence, by a rough path passing by the Rositten Alp, we ascended to the cave in about three hours. The last hundred and sixteen meters of the path were cut across some moderately steep rock slabs and a perfectly unnecessary iron hand-railing affixed.

The entrance faces northeast. Here there must have been a slight draught of cold air moving outwards, the effect of which was perceptible to the eye, as at the point where the cold inside air met the quiet warm outside air, a faint mist was visible. From the entrance, a sharp slope, set at an angle of about forty degrees, led to the lowest point of the cave. The upper half of this slope was still covered with the winter snow which had blown or had slid in. We descended on the right hand edge of the snow by means of some steps cut in the rock by the Deutschen-Oesterreichischen Alpen Club. These steps were covered with a sticky, red mud, which left almost ineradicable stains on our clothing, and as there was also ice in places, they were decidedly slippery.

At the bottom of the slope we were at the lowest point of the cave, to which all the water flowed, and where it drained off into a crack with a loud gurgling noise. Back of us was the daylight streaming through the entrance; opposite to us was first an ice floor, then a great ice slope, which came down from the further end of the cave. The ice was transparent and of a pale ochre-greenish hue, and filled the entire width of the cave. There is a streak of iron, probably, through the limestone, which in places tints the rocks a dull red. The color impression is a dull green-red, and, on account of the size of the entrance, the light effect is only semi-subterranean.

The ice floor was covered with a layer of slabs of ice, eight or ten centimeters thick, which, earlier in the year, had evidently had water under them. The ice wall or ice slope consisted of two big waves, one above the other, the lower set at an angle of about ten degrees, the upper set at an angle of about twenty-five degrees. To get up the upper wave required about twelve steps cut with the axe. Behind the upper wave, five or six fissure columns streamed out to the beginning of the ice. One ice stalactite, at least two or three meters long, overhung the ice floor, and Gruber said about this: “Well, I wonder it has not fallen yet: they seldom last as late in the year,” a confirmation of what was clearly evident, namely, that the whole cave was in a state of thaw.

In two places there was a strong, continuous drip from the roof to the ice floor, which formed, in each case, what I can only call an ice basin. These basins were nearly circular; one was about four meters, the other about two, in diameter. Around about two-thirds of the rim of the larger one, ice rose in a surrounding ring two or three meters high, suggesting that earlier in the year this basin was a cone, and possibly a hollow cone. The depth in the ice floor, in both cases, was about one and a half meters, and each basin contained some thirty centimeters in depth of water. They reminded me of the rock basins one sees in mountain torrents, where an eddying current has worn smooth all the edges of the rocks. From the larger of these basins, a channel as deep as the basin ran to the lowest point of the cave. This channel was cut out by the overflow, which ran through it in a tiny stream.[3]

THE SCHAFLOCH.

The Schafloch, on the Rothhorn, near the Lake of Thoune, is one of the biggest glaciÈres in the Alps. On the 15th of August, 1895, after early coffee, made by the portier of the Hotel BelvedÈre at Interlaken, I drove to Merligen, on the north shore of the lake, with Emil Von Allmen, an excellent guide. We left Merligen on foot at a quarter before seven, and, making no stops on the way, reached the Schafloch at ten minutes past ten. The path mounts gently up the WÜste Thal, which higher up is called the Justiz Thal. The track through the latter is almost on a level, over grassy alps. On the right hand rise the steep, almost dolomitic, limestone cliffs of the Beatenberg. On the left is the range of the Rothhorn, with steep grass and forest slopes below, and limestone cliffs above. The last hour of the walk was up these slopes, by what Baedeker calls a “giddy path.” By leaving the word “giddy” out, his description is accurate. The cavern is at the base of the limestone cliff, and the grass slope extends up to it.

The entrance to the Schafloch is at an altitude of 1752 meters: it is a fine archway, and a low wall is built partly across it. In front of this, we sat down and consumed our chicken and cheese, and that best of a traveller’s drinks, cold tea. The day was windless, and when I lighted a cigar, to see whether there was any draught at the entrance, the smoke rose straight up, showing that the air was perfectly still. When we were sufficiently cooled off, we entered the cave. The entrance faces east-south-east, but after about ten meters the cavern takes a sharp turn to the left, forming a sort of elbow, and runs about due south, constantly descending in an almost straight line. For the first eighty meters or so, the floor was covered with blocks of fallen limestone, among which we had to carefully pick our way. Then we began to find ice, which, a few meters further on, spread out across the entire width of the cave, with a gentle slope towards the left. The surface of the ice was rather soft, and the whole cave was evidently in a state of thaw. A few scratches with the axe—the most invaluable friend in an ice cave—were necessary at one place to improve our footing. It would have been impossible to move here without a light, and I carried our torch, made of rope dipped in pitch, which occasionally dropped black reminders on my clothes. We were in the middle of a great ice sheet to which several fissure columns streamed. On the right hand a beautiful ice stalactite flowed from the roof to the floor; it was some five meters high, and perhaps seventy-five centimeters in diameter, and swelled out slightly at the base. On the left hand were three or four ice stalagmites, shaped like pyramids or cones.

One of these cones was especially remarkable. It was at least five meters high—Von Allmen said eight—and at the bottom was about four meters in diameter. The base of this cone was entirely hollow. There was a break on one side by which we could enter, and we then stood on a rock floor with a small ice dome or vault overhead. I have seen no other hollow cone like this. The guide lighted a red Bengal fire inside, when the whole pyramid glowed with a delicate pink light, resembling AlpenglÜhn. Near this cone stood the half of another ice cone. It was quite perfect, and the missing half was cut off perpendicularly, as if with a huge cleaver. A hollow in the base of the remnant showed that this cone must have been originally also a hollow cone, and its destruction was probably due to the change in the temperature of the drip from the roof, at the setting in of the summer thaw.

Just beyond the cones, the ice floor steepens and curls over into a big ice slope, one of the finest I have seen. Von Allmen spoke of this as der gletscher, an expression I never heard applied elsewhere to subterranean ice. On the right side, the slope would be difficult to descend in the darkness. On the left, the slope is gentle and a rock juts out a little way down. Von Allmen insisted on roping—an unnecessary safeguard—but he said: “If you slip, you will probably break an arm or a leg, and then we shall be in a nice mess.” He then cut about twelve steps in the ice, down to the rock, while I shed light on the performance with our torch. We were so completely away from daylight that black was the predominating color; and even the ice was a dark gray, and only appeared white in the high lights. Below the rock, we found a narrow strip on the left side of the ice slope free from ice and blocked with boulders, over which we carefully picked our way down. At the bottom, the ice expanded into a level surface, stretching nearly to the end of the cave. There were only a few fissure columns in this part of the cavern, where the most remarkable feature was the cracks in the rock walls, which were so regular in formation that they almost looked like man’s handiwork. The rocks are free from stalactites, and in fact stalactites seem a good deal of a rarity in glaciÈres.

On retracing our steps, we saw, when the first glimmers of daylight became perceptible, the rocks assume a brilliant blue color, as if they were flooded with moonlight. This effect lasted until near the mouth of the cavern.

DÉMÉNYFÁLVA JEGBARLANG.

A little west of PoprÁd, in Northern Hungary, on the railroad between Sillein and Kassa, is the village of LiptÓs Szt MiklÓs, to which place I journeyed on the 12th of June, 1896. The conductor was the only man on the train or at any of the stations who would admit that there was a glaciÈre at DÉmÉnyfÁlva, and that it was feasible to get into it: every one else professed entire ignorance on the subject. It is perhaps, worth noting at this time that it is always difficult to get any information about glaciÈres; in fact, the advice about cooking a hare might well be applied to glaciÈre hunting: first catch your glaciÈre.

The scenery between Sillein and MiklÓs was picturesque. The hills were covered with forest. In one place, the railroad ran through a beautiful mountain gorge alongside a river, where a number of rafts were floating down. There were also some primitive ferries, where a rope was stretched across the river, and the force of the current carried the ferryboat across, once it was started. Many peasants were at work in the fields; often in squads. White, blue, brown, and a dash of red were the predominating colors in their dress. The men wore white trousers, made of a kind of blanket stuff, and a leather, heelless moccasin of nearly natural shape. Almost all the women had bare feet; those of the older ones were generally shaped according to Nature’s own form, while those of the younger ones were generally distorted from wearing fashionable shoes. We went past several villages of huts with thatched roofs, something like the Russian villages one sees beyond Moscow, only less primitive.

The inn at MiklÓs was poor, and as at DÓbsina, the pigs lived in the yard and occasionally came for an interview under the covered doorway. Inquiries elicited the information that DÉmÉnyfÁlva could be reached by carriage, so I engaged one at the livery stable. The owner told me that about twenty years before, he leased the glaciÈre and carried on a regular business in supplying Buda-Pest with ice. He had thirty lamps put in to give light to the workmen, who brought up the ice in baskets on their backs.

At half past five o’clock next morning the carriage, which was innocent of paint, lined with a sort of basket work and without springs, but certainly strongly built, stood at the door. A boy of about eighteen years of age, who could speak German, went along as interpreter. The morning was dismal, and, every quarter of an hour or so, a shower of thick mist fell and gradually made us damp and uncomfortable. After about twenty minutes on a pretty bad road, we came to a place where there was a fork, and the driver turned to the left, over a track which consisted of two deep ruts through the fields. Soon after, we heard some shouting behind us, and a fierce-looking man, in a leather jacket and carrying a large axe, came up and abused the driver. He was not an agreeable person; however, presently he simmered down and began to smile. It turned out that he was a wÄchter, that is, a guardian of the fields, and that we were trespassing. The driver meekly promised to return by the other route, and we went on our way in peace. After awhile, we drove into some woods and then into a mountain gorge, with forest-covered slopes at the base and with limestone cliffs jutting out above. Here we came to the cottage of the wÄchter or fÖrster of the surrounding woods, who also acted as guide to the cave, for the few tourists who came to see it; and when he heard of our destination, he at once slipped on a second ragged coat, took a woodman’s axe and started on foot, going much faster than the carriage. This was not surprising, for the road resembled nothing but the bed of a mountain brook, a mass of boulders with ruts between them. This highway was made by the peasants driving their carts over the plain in the same place, and as the soil was cut away, the boulders appeared; and over and among these we went banging along, and we were jolted about and bumped into each other, until every bone in my body ached.

At a quarter past seven o’clock we came to another house in a little glade, where the carriage stopped; and on asking the fÖrster for his name, he wrote down in my note book, in a clear well formed hand:—Misura, Franz. From the glade, ten minutes’ walk on a mountain path, up an easy slope, took us to the entrance of DÉmÉnyfÁlva. It is about two meters wide by three quarters of a meter high. We passed through and entered a large chamber, well lighted from the right by another opening, which is higher up and bigger than the entrance. The air in this chamber was at about the same temperature as that of the outside air, and, on our return from the nether world, it seemed positively balmy. In the floor at the end of the chamber, a small pit yawns open. It is perpendicular on three sides and set at a sharp angle on the fourth. A wooden staircase of some two hundred steps, many of which are sadly out of repair, leads nearly straight down this slope to the glaciÈre.

After descending about eighty steps of the staircase, bits of ice appeared on the walls and floor and after some thirty steps more, a lateral gallery opened to the right, and into this we turned. This may be called the upper cave or story, for in DÉmenyfÁlva—besides the entrance chamber—there are practically two stories, the upper one of which is mainly ornamented with stalactites, the lower one with ice. There was a little ice on the floor from which rose some small ice columns, perhaps fifty centimeters in height. The cave or gallery had a gentle downward slope and turned towards the left. After some little distance, we came to another wooden staircase, of ten or twelve steps, quite coated over with thick, solid ice. Misura had to cut away at it for several minutes, before he could clear the steps enough to descend. This was in fact the beginning of an ice wall, the Eiswand or Eismauer, which, turning to the right, flowed through a rock arch to the lowest cave. The rock arch or portal was some three meters wide and two meters high, and a fringe of beautiful organ-pipe like icicles hung on it on the right hand. Just beyond the portal the ice sloped steeply for a couple of meters; then it became level and on it rose a little pyramid, a meter and a half in height perhaps, and a column; then the ice sloped away again to the lower cave.

We then continued our course beyond the rock portal along the upper cavern for about two hundred meters. It was a fine large gallery or passage and during the first fifty meters or so, we found numerous small ice cones, perhaps a hundred of them, from tiny little ones to some about forty centimeters in height. Many of these were columnar in form, nearly as large at the top as at the base: in some cases the top was flat, and the columns then looked almost as if an upper portion were sawn off. I have seen this shape of column nowhere else. In places there were slabs and bits of ice on the floor. The last hundred meters of this upper cave was free from ice and was exceptionally dry. It was formed of a pale yellow limestone rock, almost dolomitic in color, and many stalactites, in their thousand various shapes, hung from the roof and on the sides. In one spot, one big limestone stalagmite towered up directly in the middle of the gallery. We did not go to the end of the cave, where ice has never been found.

Retracing our course past the rock portal to the entrance pit, we descended on the long staircase for some eighty steps more, the amount of ice on the rocks steadily increasing. In places, frost crystals had formed in small quantities on the roof and walls. At the bottom of the pit, another lateral gallery, directly under the upper gallery, opened to the right. Entering this, we passed over broken limestone dÉbris, which seemed to overlie a mass of ice. Limestone stalactites were noticeable all through this lower cavern, and frost and icicles had sometimes formed over them, in which case the ice stalactite assumed the form of the limestone stalactite. Advancing a few meters, we went by, on our right hand, an ice pyramid of a couple of meters in height. Just beyond this, the cave turned to the left like the upper cave, and we descended to a level floor of transparent ice, into which we could see some distance. At this spot, numerous icicles, generally of inconsiderable size, hung from the roof and on the sides of the cavern.

At the further end of this ice floor or ice lake we reached an ice slope, the Eiswand, which flowed to the ice floor from the upper cave in several waves. It was some six meters wide and twenty-five meters long; and it was not steep, perhaps fifteen degrees in the steepest portions. On the slope some old, nearly obliterated steps were visible, and at these Misura proceeded to cut, and with torch in one hand and axe in the other, gradually worked his way up, until he once more reached the level spot whence we had looked down the ice slope. Here he stood waving his torch, a proceeding indeed he did constantly throughout the trip, for he seemed exceedingly proud of the beauties of his cavern. This waving of torches, however, is exceedingly foolish, as their smoke quickly blackens stalactite, and in fact nothing but candles and magnesium wire should be carried for lighting purposes underground. The ice of the ice slope was hard, gray and opaque, quite different from that of the ice lake. The ice floor is formed of new ice, which is gradually refilling the place from which Misura said the ice for Buda-Pest was taken out twenty-five years ago. To prove this assertion, he called my attention to the side of the lake directly opposite the ice slope. At that spot, under the limestone rubbish over which we came, there was an outcrop of perpendicular opaque ice about a meter high. Misura said that the workmen began to cut at the ice slope and that they dug out a couple of meters in depth from the ice lake, until they had cut back to where the vertical outcrop was standing.

The explanation seemed to be in accord with the facts, and if so, it would go to show that the ice in this cave is of slow formation and great permanency; as seems also proved by the steps on the ice wall, which—we were the first party in the cave in 1896—had remained over from the preceding summer. Misura told me he had never seen so much ice nor seen it so hard as during our visit, and he added that there was generally water on the ice lake, and he thought there would be some in two or three weeks more. The greatest quantity of ice in the upper cave was at the head of the ice-slope, and it would seem as though there must be cracks or fissures in the overhead rocks there, through which the water is supplied to feed the ice, not only that of the upper cave, but also the larger portion of that of the lower cave.

The heavy winter air would naturally sink down into the entrance pit to the lower cavern, and some of it diverge into the beginning of the upper cavern, which at first is distinctly a down slope. A little beyond the portal at the head of the ice slope, the upper cave is either horizontal or in places slightly ascending. Probably this prevents the cold air from entering further, and probably also, the heat of the earth neutralizes the cold air of winter beyond a definite spot.

The air in the cave seemed absolutely still throughout; it was also extremely dry, undoubtedly because melting had not yet begun. The icicles evidently were formed by the slow drip freezing as it descended, and there were no perceptible cracks nor fissures in the rocks underneath them. The facts seem to me to prove that neither evaporation nor regelation can be the factors at work in making the ice and we may deduce an important rule therefrom. When a cave is dry, then the air is dry; when a cave is wet, then the atmosphere is damp. In other words, the state of dryness or dampness of glaciÈre atmosphere depends on how much the ice is thawing and parting with its moisture.

On our return to the base of the long staircase, and while we ascended it, we had an exquisite moonlight effect, much resembling the one at the Schafloch.

THE FRAINER EISLEITHEN.

About two hours by rail, north of Vienna, is the village of Schoenwald, to which I journeyed on June the 15th, 1896. At the railroad station there was a K. K. Post Omnibus in waiting, which, when it was packed with passengers and luggage, drove over to Frain in an hour. The admirable road lies across a rolling plain, until it reaches the brink of the valley of the Thaya, to which it descends in long Alpine zigzags. On the bluff overlooking the opposite side of the river, there is a fine schloss.

I secured the seat next to the driver and questioned him about the Eisleithen. Although he had driven on this road for five years, without visiting the Eisleithen, yet he was positive that they were warm in winter, but cold in summer. He said more than once: Desto heisser der Sommer, desto mehr das Eis, and in fact was an emphatic exponent of the notions generally held by peasants, which some savants have adopted and tried to expound. At Frain, I applied at the little hotel for a guide, and was entrusted to the care of the hotel boots. He was an intelligent, talkative youth, but he insisted also that “the hotter the summer, the more ice there is.” However, he was polite, and made up for any shortcomings by always addressing me as der gnÄdige Herr.

The day was hot, so it took us three-quarters of an hour on foot, along the valley of the Thaya, to reach the base of the bluff where the Eisleithen are situated, at an altitude of about four hundred meters. The hillside is covered with patches of scrubby forest; and towards the summit, the entire mass of the hill is honey-combed with cracks and the rocks are much broken up. After about ten minutes’ ascent up a little path, we came to small holes, from each of which a current of cool air poured out; these holes seemed fairly horizontal, and the temperatures were high enough to prove that there was no ice within. A little further on, we came to a hole or tiny cave among a pile of rocks, where there was a painted sign: Eisgrube. It went down from the mouth, and I put my hand well in, but, beyond the length of my arm, I could neither see nor measure its shape or depth. The air felt cold, but was nowhere near freezing point; nor was it possible to determine whether there was a draught: it may or may not be a wind cave. Not far from this, there were two gullies, each terminating in a small cave. The first gully was planned somewhat like certain traps for wild animals, that is, it narrowed gradually from the entrance, then became covered over; and then dwindled, after some four meters more, into a small descending hole, the end of which we could not reach. But we got in far enough, to come to large chunks or slabs of ice plastered about on the floor and sides. In this cave, which was sheltered against sun and wind, the air, as tested by the smoke of a cigar, was motionless, and the cave seemed unconnected with any air current. The second gully terminated in a somewhat larger cave, whose floor was well below the entrance; no ice was visible, however, although the air was still and the temperature low. This cave may or may not be a glaciÈre; but surely it is not a cold current cave.

These Frainer Eisleithen certainly offer an interesting field to anyone studying subterranean ice, from the fact that there are, in the same rocks, caves without apparent draughts in summer and containing ice, and caves with distinct draughts and no ice. The problem seems more intricate than is usually the case, but the solution is simply that the two classes of caves happen to be found together.

THE EISHÖHLE BEI ROTH.

The Eifel is one of the bleakest districts of Central Europe, and to one entering it from the vineyards and the well-inhabited basin of the Rhine, the contrast is impressive. The railroad rises gradually to a land of comparatively desert appearance, with rocks and trees on the heights and a sparse cultivation in the valleys. But, if the country is unattractive to the agriculturist, it is interesting to the geologist, on account of the great number of extinct volcanoes. Almost in the centre of the Eifel is the little town of Gerollstein, famed for the Gerollsteiner Sprudel, which gives forth an effervescence undreamed of by anyone, who has not visited the birth place of some of these German table waters.

About an hour’s walk from Gerollstein, on the side of a small hill, is situated the little EishÖhle bei Roth, named after a neighboring village. I went to this place, on the 25th of June, 1896, with a young boy as guide. The cave is sheltered from the wind by a wood around it, among which are many large trees. It is at the base of a wall of piled up lava, or at least volcanic, rocks which form a sort of cauldron. The entrance is a small tunnel some five meters long, which goes straight down at an angle of about twenty-five degrees and then turns sharply to the left. At the turn, the cave may be perhaps one meter in height. We did not go beyond this spot, where the air was icy and the temperature sub-normal, as the tunnel was blocked up by a large boulder, which had evidently recently fallen from the rocks in front. There was no ice, as far as we went, and the boy said it began three or four meters further in. He told me that there was no ice in the cavern in winter, but admitted that he had not entered it at that season, so that was hearsay. He had heard also that the ice was sometimes taken out for sick people, but otherwise it was not used.

It seemed to me that the conditions at Roth show that the ice is formed by the cold of winter alone: the cave is well below the entrance; it is the lowest point of the surrounding cauldron of rocks and all the cold air naturally gravitates to it; it is sheltered by rocks and trees from wind or exposure to the rays of the sun; the tunnel faces nearly due north; and the water necessary to supply the ice, easily soaks between the lava blocks.

THE FRAUENMAUERHÖHLE.

Eisenerz, in Eastern Tyrol, is a picturesquely situated little town. It is at the bottom of a great valley, with mountains all around it. Two of these are bare, gaunt limestone peaks, which are decidedly dolomitic in form and color. The sharpest of these is to the north. It is called the Pfaffenstein and is the beginning of the range culminating in the Frauenmauer. On a mountain to the east of the town, one sees the iron mines and works, whence the town takes its name “Ironore,” and whence quantities of iron are taken out every year. The mines are said to have been in operation for over a thousand years, since about A. D. 800. After the ore is taken from the mine and roughly prepared, it is run down in small cars through a covered way to the railroad station to be shipped; and at certain times there is a seemingly endless procession of these cars, each bearing, besides its load of ore, a miner, with clothes and person entirely begrimed to the yellow-brown color of the iron.

As I walked out of the Eisenerz railroad station, an old man in Tyrolese costume asked me if I wanted a trÄger and a guide, so, while he was carrying my valise to the hotel, we came to terms. He was one of the patented guides of the district and wore the large badge of the Austrian guides. If the size of the badge made the guide, one should be safe with Tyrolese, but for difficult excursions, it will not do to trust to a guide simply because he happens to be “patented”; that is, not if one values the safety of one’s neck. Next morning, July the 9th, 1896, the old guide arrived betimes at the hotel and roused me by tapping on the wall below my window with his stick. We left at half past five o’clock. My companion, who should have known better, had not breakfasted, so by the time we reached the Gsoll Alp at a quarter-past seven, he was almost tired out. He wore the regulation black chamois knee breeches and a gamsbart in his hat. He picked many flowers en route, ostensibly because they were pretty; but in reality, I think, because it gave him the opportunity to recover his wind. He told me he was sixty-three years old, and he certainly went up hill with some difficulty, and for the first time in my life, I fairly succeeded in showing a clean pair of heels to a patentirter fÜhrer on a mountain side. At one place he found a large snail in the road. This he wrapped up in leaves and placed on a rock, and on our return he picked the leaves and snail up, and rammed the whole bundle into his pocket, informing me that it was excellent Arznei, although he did not mention for what complaint.

The road led up a wooded valley, in a sort of series of steps, bits of even ground interspersed by steeper ones, with the Pfaffenstein-Frauenmauer limestone peaks poking up their jagged summits on the left. The sky was clear at starting, except in the west, where clouds were forming, and these gradually overspread the whole sky, and finally turned to rain. Just before we reached the Gsoll Alp, we went by a huge snow avalanche, which had fallen in February and torn a lane clear through the pines, bringing down numbers of them with it. The remains of the avalanche were banked up on the side of the road, which was cut out, and many of the pines were still piled on and in the snow. Stopping ten minutes at the alp to allow my guide to recuperate on some bread and milk, we then crossed the pastures and pushed up a rather steep slope by a small path, at one place crossing the remains of another avalanche. We also came near having the attentions of a little bull which was screaming viciously. My guide said it was an extremely disagreeable beast, but he did not think it would attack him, as he always made a point of giving it bread when at the chÂlet. We reached the entrance of the cave at a quarter-past eight.

A man and a boy from Eisenerz, who had heard I was going to the cavern and who wished to profit by my guide, caught up with us here. They were much disappointed when I told them I should visit only the Eiskammer. They went into the cave at the same time that we did, and eventually we left them pushing up one of the side chambers, with only one torch in their possession. My guide said he thought they were risking their lives, as there were many holes they might fall into, besides the probability of their finding themselves in total darkness. He told me that once, while in the cavern, he heard distant yells, and, going up the gallery whence they proceeded, found a man half dead, who said he had tried to come through the mountain by himself, had broken his lantern and had remained in the darkness an indefinite number of hours; a situation, the horror of which could not be realized by anyone who has not been underground without a light and felt the absolute blackness of a cavern.

The Frauenmauer is a limestone peak, 1828 meters in height, one of several forming a horseshoe round the Gsoll Alp. It presents on that side a sheer wall of rock, in which there are two holes close together, at an altitude of 1335 meters. These are the lower openings of the FrauenmauerhÖhle, of which the higher and biggest one is used for an entrance. They are some thirty or forty meters from the base of the rock wall, and a flight of wooden steps leads up to the entrance opening, which is narrow and high. At the top of the steps, we stood in the mouth of the cave; and, going in four or five meters, saw the other opening to the left, below us. About five meters further, there was one small lump of ice, as big as a pumpkin, lying on the ground, but this may have been carried there from within. The cavern went nearly straight for some twenty-five meters from the entrance, rising all the time gently. Then came a steep little drop, of some four or five meters, in the rock floor, and here a small wooden staircase was placed. A gallery opened to the right and this was the cavern proper, which leads through the mountain. It rose considerably and contained no ice as far as we went, which was for some distance. The walking was bad, as the floor was covered with gerÖll, that is broken detritus.

Returning and continuing towards the freezing chamber, the floor of the cavern began to rise once more, continuing for some forty-five meters to its highest point, which is lower, however, than the top of the entrance, an important fact to notice. For, although the floor of the cave is considerably higher, at a distance of seventy meters within, than the level of the bottom of the entrance; still, that highest spot is below the level of the top of the entrance. This fact, and also the size of the gallery, unquestionably explains why the cold air can get in as far as it does. At this highest spot we found a considerable mass of ice, a couple of cartloads in bulk perhaps, which the guide said would melt away later in the summer. This was, perhaps, the remains of a fallen stalactite. This mass of ice is an interesting point in connection with the FrauenmauerhÖhle, for it shows that ice in a cave sometimes forms, even if in small quantities, above the level of the base of the entrance. There seems no reason why it should not do so, provided there is the necessary water supply. Such ice would, however, suffer more, as soon as the outside air was over freezing point, than would ice which was below the level of the entrance. It would probably disappear early in the year, unless the cave were in a latitude or at an altitude where snow remained in the open during most of the year.

From this highest point, the cave turns somewhat to the left, and the floor begins to slope downward, sinking gradually to some six meters below the level of the entrance. Ten meters or so from the highest point, we began to find icicles and fissure columns, and about twenty meters further, we reached an almost level ice floor, stretching across the entire width of the cave—some seven meters—and extending about fifty meters more to the end of the cave. In several places there was much frozen rime on the rock walls. There were also a number of columns and icicles, though none of any special beauty. I broke a piece off one of them, and the ice was transparent and free from prisms, showing that this column was probably of fairly recent origin. Letting a bit melt in my mouth, the water tasted pure and sweet.

In two places, there were abgrunds, that is, holes in the ice. One of these was a wide, deep hole on the left side of the cave, between the rock and the ice floor. The other was a great hole in the ice floor itself. As the edges of both holes sloped sharply, it was impossible to get near enough to look into either, but I threw in lumps of ice, and from the sound should judge that the holes were about three meters deep. The hole in the ice floor seemed to be cut by drip, and I think they both carried off the drainage.

The ice floor was sloppy and thawing rapidly. At the furthest point we reached, within about fifteen meters from the end of the ice chamber, we were stopped by an accumulation of water lying on the ice. I poked into it with my ice axe and found it about twenty centimeters in depth. There was a crust of ice on top in places. The lake was cold, but I am sure the water was not freezing, as I held my hand in it at least a minute without pain. The guide assured me that in two weeks or so the lake would be completely frozen, provided there was some fine, warm weather; but, if there was rain, he said that it would not freeze. By this statement, he unintentionally explained, what he asserted was true, namely, that the cave froze harder in August than in July. The explanation of course is, that in fine, dry weather, water does not run into the cavern, and then the lake gradually drains off, leaving the ice floor free from water; and this the natives interpret to mean that the water has frozen up.

At the edge of the lake there was a fissure in the left hand rock wall, in which my companion assured me that a column would shortly form. I absolutely doubt this statement, as, if it were true, it would be contrary to everything I have seen; still, I wish I could have returned in August, to verify the matter. I poked my torch up the fissure, also felt in with my hand. It was cold, and on the rocks inside there was much hoar frost, but I could neither see nor feel any ice mass, nor am I sure how far the fissure extended.

The air was still, damp and over freezing point throughout the Eiskammer, and all the signs showed that the cave was in a state of thaw. Although the rocks are limestone and scarcely blackened by smoke anywhere, yet as our torches did not give much light, the color impression was black and gray, like the Schafloch.

At the hotel the landlord confirmed in every particular the story of the cave freezing hardest in August or September. He had never been there himself, but stated that everyone said the same thing, and that many people had “broken their heads” trying to account for it. At eight o’clock in the evening, my guide came to let me know that the man and boy, whom we left trying to penetrate the cave, had just turned up after making all their relatives extremely anxious. They were nearly lost, and had in general an extremely uncomfortable time. It is scarcely to be wondered at that accidents occur in caves and on mountains when people, with neither knowledge nor proper preparation, go wandering off by themselves into the unknown.[4]

THE MILCHHÄUSER OF SEELISBERG.

The summer of 1896, will long be remembered by Alpine climbers for the pitiless rain storm, which kept coming steadily down during the vacation months. It was in the midst of this that I arrived at Trieb, on the Lake of Lucerne, on the 6th of August, to see whether I could find the windholes which were reported near Seelisberg. At the landing place I found Herr J. M. Ziegler, the owner of the Hotel Bellevue at Seelisberg, who promptly secured a nice, blond bearded young fellow, a relative of his and his knecht, as a guide. It was pouring when we started, a proceeding which kept on during our entire excursion. We tramped up a narrow road, paved with great stones in the old Swiss fashion, and, as my guide truly said, awfully steep for horses.

Half an hour from the boat landing, took us to the first milkhouse, which belonged to Herr Ziegler. It was in a small patch of woods, and was placed against a cliff, where rocks had fallen down and formed a talus of broken detritus. The side walls of the house were built out from the cliff and roofed over, and the front wall had a doorway closed with a wooden door. At the back the detritus or gerÖll was built into a vertical, unplastered wall between most of the interstices of which, cool air came forth. Several of these interstices were fairly large holes of uncertain depth. It was a cool day and the air currents were only a little cooler than the temperature outside.

Another half an hour of uphill walking, partly on roads and partly over soaking meadows, took us to Seelisberg, where we stopped at the house of the owner of the second milkhouse, to get the key. The owner could not go with us because he had damaged his foot, by wearing great wooden shoes or sabots armed with enormous spikes, while cutting grass on steep slopes. He was hospitable enough: unlike his dog, who was exceedingly anxious to attack us. The owner said—in the intervals of the dog’s howls—that ice formed during the winter in the rear wall of his milkhouse and remained until about June. The milkhouse was in a little patch of woods against a small cliff, at the bottom of which were broken rocks. We had some difficulty in getting in, working for at least ten minutes at the lock, while drops of rain-water would occasionally drip into our coat collars. Just as I had given up hope, my companion succeeded in getting the key to turn. There were several pans, full of milk, placed to cool, and several barrels of potatoes; and, as at the first milkhouse, we found that the rear wall consisted simply of heaped up detritus built into a vertical position. Gentle air currents flowed from several large holes and from the cracks between the stones.

From here we went by a path through woods and over meadows down to the lake, coming to the shore some distance to the west of the steamboat landing. Everything was soaking wet, and as we proceeded, I felt my clothes getting wetter and my shoes absorbing water like sponges until, when we came to an overflowing brook, wading through seemed rather pleasant. There is one advantage of getting thoroughly wet feet in the mountains: it makes crossing streams so much easier, as one does not delay, but simply steps right in.

The lower milkhouse was on the shore of the lake, near the house of a fisherman, whose wife opened the door for us. There was some milk in pans and several barrels of wine; and on a board were a number of ferras from the lake; the result of two days’ catching in nets. This was the largest of the three milkhouses; although it did not have as many big holes in the rock wall as the others, but only the interstices between the blocks of rock, whence we could feel cool air flowing out. The woman said that the ice melted away by April or May, but that in winter the wine barrels were all covered with frost. She also said that the air coming from the clefts in summer was colder when the weather was warm, than when it was rainy. Doubtless the temperature of the draughts remains the same during the summer, but the air feels cooler to the hand when the outside air is hot.

A walk of another half hour, through more soaking wet grass, brought us back to the steamboat landing at Trieb, where I touched my guide’s heart with the gift of a five franc piece, and had a talk with Herr Ziegler. He said that there were a number of places in the neighborhood whence cold air came forth during the summer from cracks in the rocks: that there were also other milkhouses, notably one at Tell’s Platte, on the lake: and that the milkhouses were not generally used in winter, when the doors were left open, to allow the cold air to penetrate as much as possible through the rocks behind. During the winter the draughts were reversed, and poured in instead of out of the openings, and Herr Ziegler thought that at that time the interior of the rock cracks became chilled, and that possibly ice formed in them which helped to chill the summer currents, when the draughts poured out from the holes.

THE GLACIÈRE DE LA GENOLLIÈRE.

On Tuesday, the 11th of August, 1896, a cool and rainy day, I left Geneva and went by train to Nyon, where I found at the station a little victoria, in which I drove up to Saint-Cergues. The road lay across the plain to the base of the slopes of the Jura, and then up these in long zigzags; it was admirably built and on the hill slopes passed the whole way through a beautiful thick forest, principally beeches and birches. At Saint-Cergues, I went to the Pension Capt, where the landlady soon found a guide in the shape of the gendarme of the district, a right good fellow, Amy AimÉe Turrian by name. He was in uniform, with an army revolver in a holster at his belt. We then drove about half an hour beyond Saint-Cergues, the road rising but little, and the thick forest giving place to a more open wood of evergreens, with patches of pasturage. As a forest sanitarium, Saint-Cergues seems unsurpassed in the whole of Europe. The carriage turned up a little country road, which soon became too rough for driving, so we proceeded on foot for about another half hour, through pine woods and pastures, to the glaciÈre. Turrian enlivened the way with an account of his life as a gendarme, of the long solitary six hour patrols in the woods in winter, and of how he lay in ambush for poachers. He said he would not take long to fire on anyone resisting arrest, as that was sÉrieux.

The glaciÈre is in the middle of a pasture, with several pine trees overhanging it. It is surrounded by a wall, built to prevent the cows from falling in. There are two pits, side by side and about three meters apart: they are some thirteen meters in depth, with a width of five or six meters. They open into one another at the bottom; the rock separating them, forming a natural bridge overhead. One of the pits is vertical on all sides. The other is vertical all around, except on the side furthest away from the natural bridge. Here the side of the pit is in the shape, so usual in glaciÈres, of a steep slope. Down this slope we descended. It was slippery and muddy, owing to the recent heavy rains, and my ice axe proved invaluable and probably saved me some unpleasant falls. Under the bridge, the floor was covered with a mass of shattered limestone debris, among which there was neither ice nor snow; both of which my guide said he had found in abundance the preceding June. A little limestone cavern opened on one side below the bridge. A great, flat limestone slab formed a natural lintel, and, lighting our candles, we stooped down and passed under it into the cave, which was about the size of a room and in which we could just stand up. At the entrance and over most of the floor there was ice, in one place thirty or forty centimeters in depth, as I could see where a drip from the roof had cut a hole. There were no signs of icicles or columns. My guide said he had never penetrated into this chamber, which he thought, on his earlier visit, was blocked with ice and snow. I did not see any limestone stalactites anywhere, and I am inclined to think that the low temperatures of glaciÈres have a tendency to prevent their formation.

After our visit, we went to the ChÂlet de La GenolliÈre close by, where there were some thirty cows and calves. The intelligent berger or manager said that most of the ice from the glaciÈre was used for butter making during the hot weather; and that between the inroads thus made upon it and from other causes, the ice disappeared every year before autumn, but that it formed afresh every winter; pretty good evidence to show that the ice in this cave has nothing to do with a glacial period. He also stated that when he first entered the inner chamber in the spring there were four ice columns there.

The glaciÈre de La GenolliÈre is a clear exemplification of the theory that the cold of winter is the sole cause for the ice. The whole glaciÈre is rather small and is fairly well protected against wind. Although snow cannot fall directly under the rock arch, yet I should imagine it drifts under, or after melting, runs in and refreezes. To the inner cave snow, as snow, could hardly reach; and the cavern is probably filled, like most cave glaciÈres, from frozen drip. The inner cave is, therefore, a true cave glaciÈre, while the outer pits and the bridge are something between a gorge and a cave. La GenolliÈre should, I think, be visited about the end of June, when the ice formations are certainly larger and more interesting than in August.

THE FRIEDRICHSTEINER OR GOTTSCHEER EISHÖHLE.

A little to the east of, and in about the same latitude as Trieste, is the small town of Gottschee, now reached by a branch railroad from Laibach. Gottschee is a German settlement almost in the centre of the district known as the Duchy of Krain, Austria, which is mainly inhabited in the north by Slavonians and in the south by Croatians. Gottschee lies directly at the western base of the Friedrichsteiner Gebirge, one of whose peaks is the Burgernock. On the eastern slopes of this mountain is situated the Friedrichsteiner or Gottscheer EishÖhle, at an altitude of about nine hundred meters.

On the 24th of June, 1897, I left Gottschee at half past six o’clock in the morning with Stefan Klenka, a nice little man. I had asked to have him come at six o’clock, but he did not turn up and I had to send for him. His excuse was, that tourists always ordered him for six o’clock, but when the time came, they were still in bed. He had taken a German officer and his wife to the cave the year before, and after keeping him waiting three hours, they started at nine o’clock. The result was that they did not get to the cave until two o’clock, and returned to Gottschee just at nightfall.

We reached the cave at half past eight o’clock. The steep and rough path went uphill through a fine forest, which my guide said was Urwald, i. e., primeval forest; and there were certainly some big trees and many fallen ones, and much underbrush. He assured me that bears were still plentiful in the neighborhood, and that Prince Auersperg, who owns the shooting, does not allow them to be killed, preferring to pay for any damage they may cause to the peasants’ fields or for any cattle they may dine on, rather than to have these interesting animals exterminated from his woods. He also said that there was a two meter snowfall in Gottschee in winter: a sufficient quantity to account for the glaciÈres. At one place on the road we stopped before a small crack in the rocks, and Klenka dropped in some small stones, which we could hear strike two or three times a long distance below. There is surely an unexplored cavern at this spot.

The Friedrichsteiner EishÖhle is a large pit cave, well lighted by daylight. It is sheltered from any winds by the great trees which grow all around it and even over the rock roof. A long, steep slope leads straight into the pit and from the top the ice floor is in full sight. On both sides of the slope the rocks are almost sheer. Over the bottom of the slope the rock roof projects at a great height. The sides of the cave rise perpendicularly at least forty meters, and in fact, the cave suggests an unfinished tunnel set on end.

Some years ago, the Deutschen und Oesterreichischen Alpen Verein built a wooden staircase, in a series of zigzags, on the slope. This staircase should have been cleared off earlier in the year, but, of course, the matter was neglected. Down these steps we descended until they became covered with snow, and lower down with hard ice. All this was winter’s snow which fell directly on to the slope and gradually melted and froze again, so this was really a miniature glacier. It was not subterranean ice at all. We cut down the snow, but had to stop when we came to the ice, as it would have involved a couple of hours at least of the hardest kind of step cutting; and this my guide did not care to undertake, especially as he was nearly killed on this slope the week before. He had reached, with some tourists from Trieste, a place above that where we stopped, when he slipped and fell down the slope, shooting clear across the cave, where he remained until ropes were procured, and he was dragged out. He afterwards showed me the numerous cuts and bruises he had received on his perilous glissade.

We had to stop also for another reason. I had unwisely brought as wrap, a thick overcoat reaching to the knees, and this was such an impediment on the icy staircase, that I took it off, and soon began to feel long shivers creeping down my spine. This question of extra clothing for glaciÈre exploration is hard to arrange. One must guard against most trying changes of temperature. For, on entering a big glaciÈre, the heat of a July day without, will, at a distance of only a few meters, give place to the cold of a January day within, and nothing could be better devised than a big glaciÈre to lay the seeds of rheumatism. It is difficult to plan a garb suitable to meet all the varying conditions, but the dress must be cool and warm, and light enough to permit free motion. The clothes I have found most practical are a thin waistcoat and thick trousers, and two short sack coats, one of them a heavy winter one. The coats should button at the throat, and it is well to place straps round the bottom of the trousers. Thick kid gloves should always be worn in caves, to save cutting the hands on rocks or ice in the darkness, and hobnails may prevent some unpleasant slips.

From the point where we stopped, some ten meters away from the ice floor, the largest portion of the cave was visible. The finest object was a big ice curtain or vorhang, as my guide called it, which, from a height of five or six meters, flowed down from fissures to the ice floor, and which covered the rocks on the eastern side. Under one point of this curtain, Klenka said that there was a deep hole in the ice. Smaller fissure columns also streamed from the rear wall to the ice floor. The ice floor itself was flat, of an ochre greenish tinge, and was covered with broken ice fragments. We could not see the western portion of the cavern, as the rocks jutted out in a sort of corner. Klenka said that there were several small pyramids there; a large one which he spoke of as the Altar; and a small ice slope, plastered on the side rocks.

The sides of the cave were of a dark gray limestone rock, and from the top of the slope they assumed a decidedly bluish tone, and I am inclined to think that there was already—we were there from eight-thirty A. M. until ten A. M.—a faint mist in the cavern. This is the most interesting phenomenon connected with the Friedrichsteiner EishÖhle. The cavern faces due south, and about midday, in clear weather, the sun shines directly into it, causing a mist or cloud to form in the cave on warm days; a mute witness that evaporation is connected with the melting, not with the forming, of the ice. The air at every point seemed still.

On my return to Gottschee, I called on one of the professors of the K. K. Gymnasium, and he told me many interesting facts about the surrounding country. Among other things he said that no traces of a glacial period or indeed of glaciers were found in the Krain; and as this district is particularly rich in glaciÈres, this fact is a strong proof against the glacial period theory. He assured me also that many bears still existed in the neighborhood; that one family was known to inhabit the woods round the Friedrichsteiner EishÖhle, and that he had often seen bear tracks on his own shooting, some ten kilometers to the south.

THE SUCHENREUTHER EISLOCH.

On the 25th of June, 1897, I left Gottschee at six-thirty A. M. in an einspÄnner, and drove thirteen kilometers southward, over a good road, albeit hilly in places, to Mrauen, which we reached in about two hours. The weather was exceedingly hot. I took Klenka along, as he spoke German, and he entertained me on the drive by telling me that there were many poisonous snakes in the country, of which the kreuzotters or vipers were the worst, and that three or four persons were bitten every year.

Mrauen is in Croatia, and I could see a slight difference in the people and their dress from those of Gottschee. From Mrauen, the landlord of the Gasthaus Post, Josef Sirar, led us to the Grosses Eisloch. This is sometimes spoken of as the Eisloch bei Skrill, but as it lies in a patch of woods below the village of Suchenreuth, the Suchenreuther Eisloch seems the correct name. At least that was what Sirar called it. It took us about an hour on foot from Mrauen to get into the woods. On the way we met two guards in uniform, carrying MÄnnlicher carbines with fixed bayonets, and it was agreeable to feel that the strong arm of the Austrian government extended over this semi-wild land. In the woods, following Sirar’s able guidance, we took a short cut—always a mistake—and were lost temporarily in a maze of bushes and brambles, in which I thought of the kreuzotters. After that, Sirar at first could not find the cave and had to hunt around for it, while I sat on a stone and waited impatiently.

At the cave a rather steep slope of wet mud, covered with dead leaves, led down through a rock arch. Sirar had to cut several steps in the mud with his hatchet, or we should probably have sat down suddenly. The archway opened into a moderately large cavern, which was about twenty meters deep, almost round and some fifteen meters in diameter. The slope continued right across the cave, and on some parts of it were logs of wood and much dÉbris. On the wall hung a few limestone stalactites. In the roof of the cave was a great hole, and under this was a big cone of old winter snow, which had become icy in its consistency, and on which there was much dirt and many leaves. The temperature in the cave was several degrees above freezing point, and there was no ice hanging anywhere. Sirar said that when the weather got hotter, the ice would come; but as he said also, that he had been only once before in the cave, some ten years ago, his opinion was not worth much. Both men said that the preceding winter was unusually warm.

THE NIXLOCH.

Near Hallthurm in Bavaria, a railroad station between Reichenhall and Berchtesgaden, is a well known congeries of windholes, called the Nixloch. I visited it on Friday, July the 2d, 1897, with a railroad employee, whom I found at the peasants’ gasthaus.

The Nixloch is ten minutes distant in the forest, on the slopes of the Untersberg. It is among a mass of big limestone blocks, and close by are the remains of the walls of an old castle or fortification. The Nixloch descends from the entrance for about two meters nearly sheer, and there is just room to get through. As I sat within the outside edge of the mouth of the cave, the smoke of my cigar was slowly carried downward into it.

Dropping down through the hole, we found ourselves in a small cavern formed of rough limestone blocks overhead and underfoot. It is possible to go still further down and my companion said that formerly it was possible to go through the cave and come out at a lower opening; this exit, however, was destroyed when the railroad was built. The draught, as tested by the flame of a candle, was still drawing in some seven or eight meters from the entrance. There is a second cavity immediately next to the entrance, and at the bottom of these holes, the inward draught was so violent as to blow the candle out. The thermometer outside in the shade was 28°C.; inside the cave, where the draught was still perceptible, it was about 20°C. Within the cave I noticed two large, dark brown spiders.

On returning to the gasthaus, I had a talk with some peasants who were dining there, and they told me that it was warm in winter in the Nixloch, and that ice never formed there.

THE DORNBURG.

If one draws a line northeast from Coblentz and another northwest from Frankfort-on-the-Main, they will intersect nearly at the Dornburg. The railroad from Frankfort goes, via Limburg and Hadamar, to Frickhofen and Wilsenroth, from either of which villages the ice formations of the Dornburg are easily reached on foot in half an hour.

I arrived at Wilsenroth on the 26th of July, 1897, and soon found an old forester, who said he had lived in the neighborhood for over fifty years, to show me the way. The Dornburg is a low hill, perhaps a hundred meters high and a kilometer long. It is basaltic and covered with sparse woods. The forester said that on top were the remains of the foundations of an old castle, and that this was possibly the origin of the name Dornburg. We circled round the eastern base of the hill for some ten minutes, when we came to a little depression, filled with basalt debris, among which were several small holes, out of which came currents of cool air.

Ten minutes further in the woods, we arrived at the Dornburg Restauration and then almost immediately at the glaciÈre. It is at the bottom of a talus of broken basaltic rocks and has been much affected by the agency of man. In it are two eislÖcher or stollen, as the forester called them. These are little artificial pits or cellars, dug into the talus. They are side by side, opening about southeast, and each is about one and a half meters wide, three meters long, and two meters high. The sides are built up with wooden posts and overhead is a thick roof of logs strewn with dirt. The day was cool and at the mouth of each eisloch, a faint outward current of air was discernible at nine-thirty A. M. I could not find any currents coming into the eislÖcher. Inside it was cold and damp, and evidently thawing. There was a good heap of ice in each eisloch; it was clear, and I could detect no trace of prisms.

By much questioning, I dug out something of the history of these stollen from the forester. Formerly the ice was found at this spot, among the boulders at the base of the slope. But the people gradually took many of these basaltic blocks away, to break up for road making, and then the ice diminished. About 1870, a brewery, since burnt, was built at the Dornburg and the brewer had these stollen built, a sort of semi-natural, semi-artificial ice house. Every winter, the present owner of the stollen throws a quantity of snow into them, and this helps materially in forming the mass of ice.

Just below the restaurant there is a spring, which was said to be extremely cold, but there was nothing icy nor apparently unusual about it.

Under the restaurant itself is an interesting cellar. It was closed by wooden doors. First there was a passage way which turned steadily to the right, and which we descended by some ten steps. This was about two meters wide and was full of beer bottles and vegetables. On the left of the passage was a large double chamber where meat is kept. At eleven-thirty A. M. a faint draught blew down the passage and into the hall, the outside door being then open. The double hall was perhaps six meters each way, and I could detect no air currents coming into it at any place, except from the passage way. Both passage and halls were, as far as I could see, entirely built over with masonry. There was no ice and the temperature was some 7° or 8° above freezing point.

The daughter of the proprietor of the restaurant said that ice began to form in the cellar in February and that it lasted generally until October; but that this year it was destroyed early because the masonry was repaired, although it was still possible to skate in the cellar as late as March. In the beginning of winter the cellar was warm, and as she expressed it, der Keller schwitzt dann, which I suppose means that the walls are damp. She also said that it was a naturlicher Keller, and I am inclined to think that it was a natural glaciÈre, converted into a cellar.

This visit to the Dornburg gave me many new ideas about classifying glaciÈres, especially in relation to the movements of air. I was long puzzled by the German terms, EishÖhlen and WindrÖhren; and it suddenly struck me, at the Dornburg, that this terminology is incorrect, when used as a classification of glaciÈres. The presence or absence of strong, apparent draughts, cannot be considered as a test as to whether a place is or is not a glaciÈre; the presence of ice, for at least part of the year, alone makes a glaciÈre, and this it does whether there are or are not draughts. It seems to me more than ever clear, however, that it all depends on the movements of air, as to whether ice forms in a cave. If the movements of air take the cold air of winter into a cave, then and then only—provided there is also a water supply—do we have ice. I am now inclined to think that caves, as far as their temperatures are concerned, should be classified into caves containing ice, cold caves, ordinary normal caves, and hot caves, without reference to the movements of air.

THE GLACIÈRE DE SAINT-GEORGES.

From Rolle, on the north shore of the Lake of Geneva; an excellent carriage road leads in two hours and a half to Saint-Georges in the Jura. At first the way goes steeply uphill and passes through many vineyards, and afterwards it crosses level fields to Gimel, then rises through woods to Saint-Georges. On arriving there on the afternoon of August 3d, 1897, I found the street filled with evergreens, and long benches and tables; the dÉbris of a fÊte de tir, which had lasted for two days, with dancing and banquets and, I suspect, much vin du pays.

When I got down stairs at six o’clock next morning, all the people of the inn were sound asleep recovering from the effects of the fÊte, and instead of their calling me, I had to call them. Finally I succeeded in getting breakfast and then started in company with a first rate fellow, named Aymon Émery.

We walked up through woods, in about an hour and a half, to the GlaciÈre de Saint-Georges, which lies at an altitude of 1287 meters in the midst of the forest. There are two holes close together. One of these descends vertically and is partly roofed over with logs on which is rigged a pulley. Émery, who was the entrepreneur of the glaciÈre, which means that he attended to getting out the ice, told me that they pulled the ice up through this vertical hole, making a noose with a rope round each block.

The other and shallower opening ended in a rock floor, which was reached by a short ladder. To the right was an arch, under which the rock terminated as a floor and descended vertically, forming the wall of the cave. On this wall two ladders, spliced at the end into one long ladder, were placed in a nearly vertical position. I tied the end of my rope round my waist, and got a workman, who had come to cut ice, to pay out the rope to me, while I went down.

The cave is rather long and narrow, perhaps twenty-five meters by twelve meters, and the limestone roof forms an arched descending curve overhead. I could not see any limestone stalactites; neither were there any ice stalactites or stalagmites in the cave, but a good part of the wall, against which the long ladder was placed, was covered by an ice curtain. It was thin and had evidently been damaged by the ice cutters or I think it would have covered the entire lower portion of the wall.

The base of the long ladder rested on an ice floor which filled the bottom of the cave, and which would probably have been level if it had not been cut out here and there in places, leaving many holes. A good many broken ice fragments lay on the floor and in some of the holes were pools of water. Some of the floor ice was exceedingly prismatic in character, and I was able to flake it off or break it easily with my hands into prisms.

Under the vertical shaft, which is at one end of the cave, was a mass of winter’s snow which had fallen through the opening. Under this snow was a deep hole, which I believe was the drain hole of the glaciÈre before the ice floor was cut away to a level below its mouth. Into this hole I threw lumps of ice and heard them go bumping down for three or four seconds.

The atmosphere was not uncomfortable, although the temperature was about 7° C. The air did not feel damp, and seemed almost still, but standing on the ice floor nearly under the vertical hole, I found that the smoke from my cigar ascended rapidly, and it seemed as if there were a rising air current, which sucked up the smoke.

Saint-Georges is a fine cavern and well worth visiting. Émery said that the ice was not cut out for eight years preceding the summer of 1897, and that for several years it was not possible to go down at all, as there were no ladders, until he put in the two we utilized.[5] All the natives of Saint-Georges believed that the ice was a summer formation and that it was warm in the cave in winter.

THE GLACIÈRE DU PRÉ DE SAINT-LIVRES.

From the GlaciÈre de Saint-Georges, Émery and I pushed on through the woods to the PrÉ de Saint-Livres. In several places we came on the tracks of deer, and my guide told me he had killed eleven roe during the last hunting season. He said also that an attempt is being made to introduce the red deer into the Jura, and that the experiment seemed to be meeting with success. We kept to the crest of the ridge along wood paths, and, as the day was fortunately cool and cloudy, we were able to walk fast and reached the PrÉ de Saint-Livres in two hours. At a spot called La Foiraudaz we met the workmen coming down with a cartload of ice, which they were taking to BiÈre. Some of this ice was extremely prismatic.

The PrÉ de Saint-Livres is a big mountain pasture or meadow, surrounded with hills covered with pine trees. In the middle of it is the ChÂlet de Saint-Livres, round which numerous cows and calves were congregated and where a small shepherd gave us some milk. The chÂlet is not one of the old picturesque Swiss chÂlets with great stones on the roof to keep it from being blown away by the wind, but a strongly built single storied stone structure, which looks extremely modern among the green hills.

The glaciÈre lies close to the chÂlet, on the southern side of the meadows, just on the edge of the woods, and is surrounded with trees. It is at an altitude of 1362 meters and faces nearly due north. To prevent the cattle from falling in, it is enclosed with a stone wall, except in front, where there is a fence formed of an abattis of pine trees. The cave belongs to the pit variety, and the pit is a big one. As you stand at the top, you can look down to the end of the glaciÈre. The rocks are vertical all round the pit, and in front there is a small rock shelf, one-third of the way down, which divides the rock wall into two long drops. Against each of these was a rickety ladder, so we fixed the end of my rope to the pine trees of the fence, and hung on to it while we climbed down. The base of the lower and longer ladder rested on a mass of snow. This was the beginning of a long snow slope which gradually turned to ice and filled the cave. The cave itself, measuring along the snow slope, is some forty meters long and some ten to fifteen meters wide, and is entirely lighted by daylight.

The snow and ice slope fell in a series of small waves, and the upper portion was rather dirty. On the right hand the workmen had fixed a rope as a handrail, and all the way down had cut a staircase in the ice, so that the descent was not difficult. Some of the ice was sloppy. The ice mass did not abut entirely against the end of the cave, but left an open space between the ice and the rock, some three or four meters wide and some four or five meters deep. Here the workmen had been getting their ice, and had cut into the ice mass for several meters, forming a little tunnel.

There were no ice cones nor stalactites, neither did I see any limestone stalactites. Much of the ice was prismatic; in fact, together with that at Saint-Georges, it was the most strongly prismatic I have seen. I can perhaps best describe it, by saying that it was brittle in texture, as I could break up small lumps in my hands. There was more prismatic ice at Saint-Livres, however, than at Saint-Georges. The air in the cave was still and decidedly damp; and the temperature was several degrees above freezing point. The day, however, was almost windless, and I would not assert that movements of air, due to the wind, might not sometimes take place in the pit.

The GlaciÈre du PrÉ de Saint-Livres is one of those caves which may be looked on as a transitional form between gorges containing ice and caves containing ice. The winter snow falls into the mouth of the pit, and is the chief foundation of the ice mass. It would be interesting to make a series of observations in this cave to see whether there was anything like glacier motion. Émery, of his own accord, expressed the opinion that much of the ice here was due to the winter snows; in fact, he thought that it was all due to it, and that it gradually descended into the cave and turned, little by little, into ice. He told me that some years ago a cow was found by the workmen, frozen into the ice, at a depth of four meters; the flesh was perfectly preserved, and was eaten. I asked him if he had ever seen insects in either cave, and he said he had not.

From the glaciÈre we walked back to the village of Saint-Georges. On asking my guide how much I owed him, he said he received four francs for a journÉe, so I gave him six francs, and we parted the best of friends.

GLACIER ICE CAVE IN THE FEE GLACIER.

During a rather protracted stay at Saas-Fee in Switzerland, I visited the glacier ice cave of the Fee Glacier on the 15th and 16th of August, 1897, both cool and rainy days. It is about half an hour’s walk from the hotel to the ice cave, which is in the snout of the Fee glacier, below the Eggfluh. A considerable stream issued from the cave. On nearing the opening, a strong cold air current poured out above the stream. At the front edge of the ice, the height of the ice roof in the centre was perhaps twelve meters and the width fifteen meters. Around the edge, the roof formed an almost perfect curve. The ice walls contracted in a regular manner within, and the cave became narrower and lower, and suggested an enormous funnel cut in half, into which you looked from the larger end. The cave also grew gradually darker, and the darkness prevented seeing further than to a depth of some fifteen meters. In the ice walls, just inside the entrance, were several crevasses, of the ordinary blue-green color. They followed nearly the same curve as the roof, but did not go through to the outside. There were no icicles. The ice was faintly stratified in places, and at the outer edge was brittle. It did not break into the long narrow prisms of the ice at Saint-Georges and the PrÉ de Saint-Livres, but rather into small lumps with facets, of all sorts of shapes. It was evidently unsafe to penetrate under the ice roof, for while I stood in front of the cave, a large lump broke off from the roof and fell with a clatter among a lot of other ice fragments already on the moraine floor. In two places there was a steady rain of drops from the roof, showing that the ice was melting.

This is perhaps the glacier cave in Switzerland which is easiest to visit, and my inspection intensified my belief in what I consider the correct explanation of some of the phenomena in glaciÈres. The suggestion was that as soon as the temperature gets above freezing point in a glacier ice cave, the only process is that of destruction of the ice, which seems to be also the case with glaciÈres.

LA GRAND CAVE DE MONTARQUIS.

My brother and I left Cluses, in Savoie, a railroad station on the line between Geneva and Chamonix, at two o’clock on the afternoon of the 22d of August, 1897, and drove up in two hours and a half to Pralong du Reposoir, a distance of eleven kilometers. The road is a route nationale, fine and broad, with parapets in many places. After passing Scionzier, it mounts gradually, passing through a tremendous wild gorge, cut by the waters and heavily clad with firs. We reached Pralong at four-thirty, and stopped at a primitive inn, still in process of construction, and tenanted only by blue-bloused peasants, who, as it was Sunday night, sat up late, drinking and making a heathenish noise they mistook for singing. I talked to some of these men, and they all insisted that there was no ice at the Grand Cave in winter, but that it came in summer. Plus il fait chaud, plus Ça gÊle, they said. One man explained the formation of the ice in an original way, and with an intelligence far above that of the average peasant. He considered that it was due to air currents, and thought that in winter the snow stopped up the holes in the rocks, through which the currents came; but that when the snow melted, the draughts could work, and that then they formed the ice.

The weather was abominable next morning, the clouds lying along and dripping into the valley; but the inn was so awful that we decided to try to reach the cave. We had a nice little blue-bloused peasant for a guide, Sylvain Jean Cotterlaz by name. We went first for about an hour on foot towards Le Grand Bornant on a fair road, to an alp called La Salle. This was surrounded by a herd of cows, some of whom seemed interested in our party. It now began to rain fiercely, and except for my brother’s perseverance, I should certainly have given in. A fair path led up steep grass slopes into the clouds covering the Mont Bargy. Each of us had his umbrella raised, and the ascent was slippery and uninspiring. An hour took us to two deserted huts, the Alpe Montarquis, and half an hour beyond, we came to the caves; by which time we were thoroughly soaked.

The caves are on Mont Bargy, at the base of a limestone precipice, which, I think, faces nearly north. There are three caves close together. The lowest, or Petite Cave de Montarquis, Cotterlaz said is also called La Cave des Faux-Monayeurs; as according to a, probably untrue, tradition, it was once used by counterfeiters. Above this is a small rock pocket, accessible down an easy slope. We went in and found that there was no ice and indeed scarcely any water in it.

The Grand—not Grande—Cave is a little higher up, and as we came to it, several sheep, which had taken refuge in the mouth from the storm, hastily skipped away, evidently distrusting our intentions. The altitude of the cave is said to be 2078 meters. The entrance must face about north east; it is elliptical in shape, about fifteen meters wide, and six meters high, and is badly sheltered against the wind. The cave is of moderate size, about sixty meters in length and forty-five meters in width, and the average height of the roof is not over four or five meters. A gentle slope leads downwards. Many blocks of rock in the front part had bits of moss growing on them, and some of the mud there was of a dull purple color, as if some dark madder was mixed with it. There was a red streak in the right hand wall, probably caused by iron. I observed no limestone stalactites nor stalagmites in the cave, the main body of which was well lighted throughout by daylight.

The ice was in the shape of a nearly level floor, about twelve meters long and eight meters wide: the shape was irregular, and the ice so smooth that it was hard to stand up. The rocks in the rear overhung the ice floor at one spot; and here, there streamed from a fissure to the ice floor an ice column, some three meters high, whose base was fully two meters distant from the rock wall. Near this column was a tiny ice cone, which evidently had been bigger. Cotterlaz seemed impressed with the fact that there was only one column in the cave, as he said that in June, there would have been many columns and a larger and deeper ice floor. The ice was sloppy in places, with several small hollows cut by the drip and containing water. In one place there was a tiny runnel filled with water, but there was no current. There was a good deal of drip all through the cave, and in fact in one or two places we might have kept on holding up our umbrellas with advantage. I hacked at several pieces of ice, but none of it was prismatic.

At the rear of the cave, the ice ran, in a tongue, up the entrance of an ascending fissure in the rocks. My brother cut here six or seven steps in the ice; and he found them difficult to make, as the ice was hard and thin, and not in a melting state. Above the ice tongue we clambered up the rocks of the fissure some four or five meters further, finding there some lumps of ice which were not melting. At this spot we were almost in darkness. A lighted match burned steadily, so that there was evidently not much draught, but the smoke gradually descended, showing a slight downward current. This was the coldest, as well as the furthest point of the cave we could reach, and we there heard a tiny waterfall trickling within the fissure, although we could not see it.

By this time we were all chilled to the bone, so, abandoning the idea of entering the Petite Cave, we retreated down the sopping wet, slippery grass slopes to Pralong, and then immediately walked all the way to Cluses to avoid taking cold. The Grand Cave was the most fatiguing trip I ever made after glaciÈres, but the circumstances were rather unusual.

THE FREEZING WELL OF OWEGO.

On Thursday, June 23d, 1898, I went to Owego, in Tioga County, New York. Inquiries at the Lehigh Valley railroad station and at the chief hotel failed to elicit any information about a freezing well; and in fact, I soon found that the existence of such a thing was a blank to the rising generation. So I called on an old resident of Owego, who told me that he knew of the well in question and that it was filled up with stones many years ago; but that he remembered that, when he was a boy, it used to freeze, and that it was spoken of as the deep well or freezing well. I then walked up to the site of the well, which is about one and a half kilometers to the northwest from the centre of Owego and about one kilometer from the Susquehanna River. It is directly in the middle of the highway, and nothing is now visible but a heap of stones.

Near by was the house of a Mr. Preston, who told me he was born in 1816, and had lived all his life at this spot. He said that the well was about twenty-eight meters deep, and that it went first through a layer of sand and then through a layer of gravel. He had more than once been down the well and had seen the sides covered with ice. A bucket sent down for water would sometimes come up with ice on the sides. Whether the water at the bottom ever froze, no one knew, for the ice caked and filled up the bore at about two-thirds of the way down and became so thick, that as Mr. Preston put it, “it was just like hammering on an anvil to try to break it.” He also stated that another well was dug about one hundred meters further down the road, and that originally this sometimes had a little ice on the sides. Of late years however, it was covered over with a wooden top and since then no ice was known to form. I could obtain no information about any other wells in the neighborhood ever showing similar peculiarities.

THE ICY GLEN, NEAR STOCKBRIDGE.

The Icy Glen is situated on Bear Mountain, about one kilometer from Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It is in the midst of fine woods and there are many big trees in it. The bottom of the glen is full of rocks and boulders, among which there is a rough path. I was told that ice remained over there much longer than anywhere else in the neighborhood, sometimes as late as May. On the 3d of July, 1898, I not only found no traces of ice or snow, but the temperatures under the boulders showed nothing abnormal. To make up for this, however, there were legions of mosquitoes.

FREEZING MARBLE CAVE, NEAR MANCHESTER.

Near Manchester, Vermont, there is a little cave,[6] which is noteworthy, in that it is in a marble formation. It is known as Skinner’s Cave, because it was owned for many years by Mr. Mark Skinner. It lies in Skinner’s Hollow, some five or six kilometers from the centre of Manchester, at the base of the eastern slope of Mount Equinox, of the Taghconic Range of the Green Mountains.

The cave is on the property of Mr. N. M. Canfield, who, on learning the object of my visit, on the 5th of July, 1898, with true native American courtesy, walked up to it with me. The last two kilometers were over a rough logging road, which towards the end was steep and covered with many broken logs. I could not have found the cave alone, as it was so surrounded with bushes, that the entrance was invisible until we actually reached it. It is in a gorge of Mount Equinox, in the midst of a beautiful forest, which effectually cuts off any wind. The cave faces nearly north and can scarcely ever, if indeed at any time, be reached by the rays of the sun. The moment we got into the entrance, we found the chilly, damp, summer atmosphere of true glaciÈre caves. The rocks were brown and mossy on the outside, but Mr. Canfield called my attention to the fact that they were marble, and on his knocking off a small piece, a section of pure white marble was exposed. In no other instance have I heard of a marble cave in connection with ice. There were scarcely any cracks or crevices in the rock.

The cave goes down with a steep slope from the entrance, much in the shape of a tunnel, for some ten meters. The slope was covered with slippery mud and decayed leaves, and at the bottom expanded into a little chamber, in which lay a mass of wet, compact snow, some two by three meters. It was evident that the snow was simply drifted in during the winter, and was in too large a mass and too well protected to melt easily, and there could be no question but that this place was purely a refrigerator. The air was tranquil throughout and there were no draughts. On the same day, a good breeze was blowing in the Manchester Valley.

THE FREEZING WELL OF BRANDON.

The Freezing Well of Brandon is situated on the western or southwestern outskirts of the village of Brandon, Vermont, not far from the railroad station. I visited it on the 7th of July, 1898. The well was protected by a wooden cover. On raising this, a faint stream of cool air seemed to issue forth; but this was probably only imagination. The sides, as far down as one could see, were built in with rather large blocks of stone without cement. At the bottom water was visible and there were no signs of ice. We drew up some water in a bucket, and although it was cool there was nothing icy about it. I twice lowered a thermometer nearly to the water and each time after ten minutes it registered only 13° C. There was certainly nothing abnormal in this temperature, in fact it was strictly normal and my thermometer showed conclusively by its actions that it could not have been near any ice mass. The people at the house, however, assured me that a month before there was ice in the well.

Afterwards I called on Mr. C. O. Luce, the owner of the well. He stated that it was eleven and a half meters deep to the bottom, that it was dug in 1858, and that the ground through which it goes was found frozen at a depth of about four and a half meters. Here there is a stratum of gravel and this is where the freezing occurs. Mr. Luce thought that the water was under the ice, that is, that the water came up from the bottom. He said also that the well usually froze solid in winter; but, that as this winter was an open one, there was less ice this year than usual. He thought that there was less ice anyway now than in former years, partly because of the cover which was put over the well, and which keeps out some of the cold; and partly because a neighboring gravel hillock, called the Hogback, was a good deal cut away, and this in some way affects the supply of cold in the gravel. He added that the sandy soil round Brandon does not as a rule freeze to a greater depth than two meters each winter. The house built beside the well was said to be comfortable in winter.

There seems no doubt that this is another refrigerator. The cold water of the winter snows percolates into the gravel mass and refreezes, and, owing to the bad conductive quality of the material, the gravel remains frozen later than the soil elsewhere in the neighborhood. The fact that the well went through a frozen gravel stratum when dug, proves that it is not alone the air that sinks into the well itself, which makes the ice. The fact that the well freezes on the whole less than formerly, apparently partly owing to the digging up of some of the gravel close by, goes to prove the same thing. The fact that the well generally freezes solid every winter, shows that although some of the gravel mass possibly remains frozen all the time, much of the ice is renewed each year. This is especially important as proving that the ice found in gravel deposits is due to the cold of winter and not to a glacial period, although, of course, no one could say for how long a time the ice was forming and melting; and this process might date back to the time of the formation of the gravel mass.

I could learn nothing of any similar place near Brandon, except that Mr. Luce said that in an old abandoned silver mine in the neighborhood, he had once seen ice during hot weather.

FREEZING TALUS ON LOWER AUSABLE POND.

On the eastern side of Lower Ausable Pond, Essex County, New York, at the foot of Mount SÉbille or Colvin, there is a talus of great Laurentian boulders, which fell from the mountain and lie piled up on the edge of the lake. Among these boulders, at a distance of about five hundred meters from the southern end of the lake, there are spaces, several of which might be called caves, although they are really hollows between the boulders. On the 12th of July, 1898, I visited this spot with Mr. Edward I. H. Howell of Philadelphia. From several of the rock cracks we found a draught of air flowing strongly out, as tested by the smoke of a cigar. The air was distinctly icy and there could be no question that there was a considerable quantity of ice among the rocks to produce the temperature.

In three places we found masses of ice. One of these hollows was small, and the other two were much larger. One of the latter was almost round in shape, and perhaps three meters in diameter; with a little snow near the mouth and with plenty of ice at the bottom. The other was a long descending crack between two boulders which joined overhead, and with the bottom filled by a long, narrow slope of ice, perhaps seventy-five centimeters in width and six meters in length, set at an angle of about thirty-five degrees. The ice was hard and non-prismatic.

The cold air affects a large area of land around the boulders. Mr. Howell called my attention to the flowers of the bunch-berry, which he said were at least two weeks behind those on the surrounding mountains. The same was true of oxalis, a pretty white flower, of which we found several beds in full bloom.

Mr. Howell went to this talus, on the 4th of July previous, with Mr. Niles, President of the Appalachian Mountain Club, on which occasion they found plenty of snow near the entrance of the larger hollow. Mr. Howell, indeed, has repeatedly visited this place, and always found ice, which must, therefore, be looked on as perennial. At all times also he has felt cold draughts flowing out; sometimes they were so strong as to lower the temperature over the lake to a distance of thirty meters or more: on hot days he has seen occasionally a misty cloud form on the lake in front of the boulders. Mr. Howell considers that the draughts so affect the surrounding air, that an artificial climate is produced, and it is owing to this that spring flowers bloom late in July and sometimes in August. Another fact well known to him, is that in hot weather, the spot in front of the boulders is the best in the whole lake to catch trout, as they always congregate in the coldest water. The Adirondack guides use these ice retaining hollows, which they call ice-caves, as refrigerators for their provisions and game in hot weather: they say that the ice is formed in winter and remains over during the summer, as it is so well sheltered.

FREEZING TALUS OF THE GIANT OF THE VALLEY.

On the indications of Mr. Otis, chief guide of the Adirondack Reserve, I explored with Mr. C. Lamb, a guide from Keene Valley, the southern base of the Giant of the Valley Mountain, Essex County, New York, on the 14th of July, 1898. A road runs from Keene Heights to Port Henry, through the gap between the south base of the Giant of the Valley and the north base of Round Mountain, and passes close to a small lake called Chapel Pond. Some three hundred meters west of this lake, we left the road and struck north, across the brook, into the thick, mossy woods. After perhaps one hundred meters, we came to a talus of great boulders of Laurentian rock, with the cliffs of the Giant, whence the boulders had fallen, rising steeply above. We found ice under several of them, although never in any quantity. The thermometer, after an exposure of fifteen minutes in one of these little hollows, registered 6° C., although not more than one meter from where the sunshine fell on the moss. In the shade of a tree one meter distant from the same hollow it registered 26° C.; a difference of 20° C. at a distance of only two meters.

Perhaps one kilometer east of Chapel Pond, there is a place, where the bases of the mountains come much nearer together, which bears the name of “The Narrows.” Here we crossed the brook again, and, after some fifteen or twenty meters of scrambling through rough woods, reached once more the talus of the Giant, composed of tremendous boulders. Among these we found ice in many places and this time in large quantities. Within one boulder cave we found an ice slab some four meters in length, by two meters in width, and one meter in thickness. This was pure, hard and non-prismatic ice, and was evidently not formed of compressed snow: in fact snow could not have drifted in under the boulder. We broke off a large piece of ice and took it back to Saint Hubert’s Inn, and it melted rather slowly. From the mouth of this cave an icy draught issued, and, as it struck the warmer air outside, a slight mist was formed. Mr. Lamb said that from the road itself he had sometimes seen mist rising from this talus. Further explorations of the talus of the Giant would probably reveal ice in many other places than those we examined.[7]

Mr. Lamb told me of two other places in the Adirondacks, where he found ice in similar boulder formations. One was in the talus of Mount Wallface in Indian Pass, between Mounts Wallface and McIntyre. The other was in the talus of Mount McIntyre in Avalanche Pass, between Mounts McIntyre and Colden. At the latter place, he found it near the trail going round the lake in the pass.

THE ICE GULCH, RANDOLPH.

The Randolph Ice Gulch is situated in Randolph Township, New Hampshire, about eight kilometers from Randolph Station, on the Boston and Maine Railroad.[8] I visited it on August 11th, 1898. At the Mount Crescent House, I found a guide in the person of Mr. Charles E. Lowe, Jr. The excursion took us about six hours. The trail was a rough bush path, cut by the Appalachian Mountain Club, and which had not been cleaned out that year. It was a cloudy but hot day and this, combined with the badness of the road, made the walk fatiguing.

The Gulch lies between Crescent and Black Mountains. The altitude of the upper end of the Gulch is something over eight hundred meters, that of the lower end about six hundred meters. It is some fifteen hundred meters long, and averages perhaps one hundred meters in width at the top, and only a few meters at the bottom. The depth may be about seventy-five meters and the sides are steep, in some places sheer. The bottom is a mass of broken, fallen rocks, with a good many trees growing among them. There are several steps, so to speak, in the Gulch, which are called chambers, although the term seems rather meaningless. Promenading through the bottom of the Gulch was fraught with difficulty, because the rocks were placed in most unsuitable positions for human progression, and my hands were certainly as useful to me as my feet in preserving equilibrium. We found ice in one or two places, but not in any great quantity. In one spot it was overlaid by water. My guide said that there was less ice than the year before. A large piece which we broke off, and which furnished us with a cooling morsel of frozen fluid, was full of air bubbles. It was not prismatic ice, and was certainly unusual in formation. It crunched up under the teeth and, although it did not look like solidified snow, yet, judging from its position among the boulders, it was doubtless formed from the melting and refreezing of snow.[9] My guide said he had heard that fresh ice began to form sometimes in September. The Gulch is well protected against wind, and I detected no draughts among the rocks. Except in the immediate vicinity of the ice, the temperature was not abnormally low.

On returning to the Mount Crescent House, I had a talk with Mr. Charles E. Lowe, Sr., who told me that Alpine plants, like those which grow on Mount Washington and Mount Adams, are found in the Gulch; but that they do not exist on the neighboring Black and Crescent Mountains. He said also that ice was present in more than one place in King’s Ravine, and that it was always there.

FREEZING BOULDER TALUS AT RUMNEY.

About three kilometers south of Rumney, New Hampshire, there is a hill called Bald Mountain, which, about three hundred meters west of the carriage road from Rumney to Plymouth, descends as a big cliff, with an exposure facing nearly southeast. At the base of this cliff, there is a talus[10] which I visited on the 27th of August, 1898, with the Sheriff of Rumney, Mr. Learned. He said he had found plenty of ice there on the 18th of August, 1897, but he doubted whether there would be any left this year, on account of the hot weather. Effectively a careful hunt failed to reveal any ice, although the talus was just the kind of place where it might have been expected, as the boulders were piled one over the other and in one or two places there were considerable hollows. The temperatures were normal, and there were no draughts. The talus is exposed to the sun, and only moderately sheltered against wind by a scrub forest. But there can be no doubt, that ice lingers there long after it has disappeared from every other spot in the neighborhood, and it seems as if our not finding any, is another proof that it is the heat of summer which melts it away.

[10] Mr. John Ritchie, Jr., wrote me about this place, where he had found ice plentiful some years ago in August, within two or three meters from the outside: he considered it only a refrigerator.