the only chalet in the neighbourhood of his day’s researches, at a late hour of the night, the whole mountain being soaked with rain.  It was a little upland chalet, which the people had deserted for the autumn and winter; and meantime a mud avalanche had taken possession, and covered the floor to a depth of several inches.  No plank was to be found for lying on; but he discovered a broken one-legged stool, and on this he sat and slept, propped as well as might be in a corner.  It is difficult to say which would be worse—­a fall from the stool by daylight into the embers of a wood fire, or the shuddering slimy waking about midnight, after a nod more vigorous than the rest, to find oneself plunged in eight cold inches of soft mud.

About half an hour beyond the chalet, we found the mouth of the glaciere, on a large plateau almost bare of vegetation, and showing the live rock at the surface.  They told me that in a strong winter there would be an average of 12 feet of snow on the ground here.[70] The glaciere itself is approached by descending one side of a deep pit, whose circumference is larger than that of any other of the pit-glacieres I have seen.  A few yards off there is a smaller shaft in the rock, which we afterwards found to communicate with the glaciere.  The NW. side of the larger pit, being the side at the bottom of which is the arch of entrance, is vertical, and we spent the time necessary for growing cool in measuring the height of this face of rock from above.  The plummet ran out 115 feet of string, and struck the slope of snow, down which the descent to the cave must be made, about 6 feet above the junction of the snow with the floor of the glaciere, which was visible from the S. side of the edge of the pit; so that the total depth from the surface of the rock to the ice-floor was 121 feet.

[Illustration:  VERTICAL SECTION OF THE GLACIERE OF GRAND ANU, NEAR ANNECY.]

When we were sufficiently cool, we scrambled down the side of the pit opposite to that in which the archway lies, finding the rock extremely steep, and then came to a slope of 72 feet of snow, completely exposed to the weather, which landed us at the mouth of the glaciere.  The arch is so large, that we could detect the change of light in the cave, caused by the passage of clouds across the sun, and candles were not necessary, excepting in the pits shortly to be described.  We saw at once that rapid thaw was going on somewhere or other; and when we stepped off the snow, we found ourselves in a couple of inches of soft green vegetable mud, like a compote of dark-coloured duckweed—­or, to use a more familiar simile, like a mass of overboiled and ill-strained spinach.  To the grief of one of us, there was ice under this, of most persuasive slipperiness.  The maire said that he had never seen these signs of thaw in his visits in previous years; and as we went farther and farther into the cave, he was more and more surprised at each step to find such a large