but still the horrors of Die hung about me, and I could only dispose of such a small amount, that Liotir waxed funny, and told me it would never do for me to die there, as there was not earth enough to scrape a grave in on the whole plain.  Then, being a practical man, he declared he should like to contract for my keep, and thought he could afford to do it at very small cost to me, and still leave a fair margin for himself.  He thought it right to make up for my want of appetite; and so, in addition to his own share, he took in an exemplary manner the share of wine which I should have taken, had I been a man like himself.  The master of the chalet sat on the family bed, smoking silently and sullenly; and as soon as Liotir had come to an end of his second bottle, he proposed to accompany us himself to the cave, as he doubted whether any of his men knew the way, and he was sure they were all busy.  When I came to pay his wife for what we had consumed, I administered thanks as well as money; to which she sternly rejoined, ‘Who pays need not give thanks;’ and to that surly view she held, in spite of my attempts to soften her down.  There was, after all, much force in what she said, under the circumstances.  They had given us no welcome, nothing but mere food, and all they expected in return was a due amount of money; thanks were a mockery in their eyes.

The cavern was reached in a few minutes, when once we got away from the chalet.  Two large pits, formed apparently by the subsidence of the surface, lay in a line about east and west, and there proved to be an underground communication between them.  From this tunnel, as it were, a long low archway led to a broad slope of chaotic blocks of stone, down which we scrambled by the aid of such light as our candles afforded.  The roof of this inner cave was horizontal for some distance, and then suddenly descended in a grand wall; and in consequence of a series of such inverted steps, the cave never assumed any great height.  The whole length of the slope was 190 feet, and its greatest breadth about 140 feet; but the breadth varied very much.  Half-way down the slope the ice commenced, fitfully at first, and afterwards in a tolerably continuous sheet.  The most careless explorer could not have failed to notice the polygonal figures stamped upon its surface.  They were larger and bolder than any I had seen before; and the prismatic nuts into which the ice broke, when cut with the axe, were of course in proportion larger than in the previous caves.  The signs of thaw, too, were unmistakeable.  Though the upper surface of the earth had seemed to be utterly devoid of moisture of any kind, large drops fell freely from the roof of the cave,[97] and the ice itself was wet.  The patron said there was no ice whatever in the winter months, and that from June to September was the time at which alone it could be found.  He declined to explain how it was that we found it so evidently in a state of general thaw in the very height of its season.  To give us some idea of the climate of the plain in winter, he informed us that the snow lay for long up to the top of the door of his chalet.