and most graceful forms.  As foot after foot, and yard after yard, ran out, and our heads craned farther and farther over the edge of the pit to follow the descending light, (we lay flat on the ice, for more safety,) the cries of the schoolmaster became mere howls, and the maire lapsed into oaths heavy enough to break in the ice.  It is always sufficiently disagreeable to hear men swear; but in situations which have anything impressive, either of danger or of grandeur, it becomes more than ever unbearable.  I remember on one occasion over-taking a large party in the descent from the Plateau to the Grands Mulets, in a place where the snow was extremely soft, and any moment might land one of us in a crevasse; and I shall never forget the oaths which caught my ear, from a floundering fellow-countryman enveloped from the waist downwards.

When 60 feet had run out, the candle stopped, and on stretching over I saw that it had reached a slope of ice which inclined very steeply northwards, and passed away under the rock, apparently into a fresh cavern.  By raising the candle slightly and then letting it drop, we made it glide down this slope for 8 feet; and then it finally rested on a shelf of ice, showing us the shadowy beginnings of what should be a most glorious ice-cave.  The little light which the candle gave was made the most of by the reflecting material which surrounded it; and we were able to see that the archway in the rock was rounded off with grey ice, and rested, as it were, on icy pillars.  As far as we could judge, there would have been abundant room to pass down the slope under the archway, if only the preliminary 60 feet could by any means have been accomplished; and I shall dream for long of what there must be down there.

As I was anxious to know whether the side of the pit was vertical ice under our feet, I contrived to get about a third of the way round the edge, so as almost to reach the fluting in the rock which formed the farther side of the pit, and then desired the schoolmaster to raise the candle slowly from the ledge on which it still rested.  As he pulled it gradually up, I was startled to find that the ice fell away sharply immediately below the spot where we had been collected, and then formed a solid wall; so that we had been standing on the mere edge of a shelf, with nothing but black emptiness below.  How far the solid wall receded at the bottom I was unable to determine, for the light of one candle was of very little use at so great a distance, and in darkness so profound.  I persuaded the maire to make an effort to reach a point from which he could see the insecurity of the ice which had seemed to form so solid a floor; and he was so much impressed by what he saw, that he fled with precipitation from the cave, and we eventually found him asleep under a bush on the rocks above.  In reaching the farther side of the pit, we crossed unwittingly an ice-bridge formed by a transverse pit or tunnel in the ice, which opened into the pit we