Shortly after we first left Couvet, a gaunt elderly female, with a one-bullock char, had joined our party, and tried to bully us into giving up the cave and going instead to a neighbouring summit, whence she promised us a view of unrivalled extent and beauty.  She told us that there was nothing to be seen in the glaciere, and that it was a place where people lost their lives.  The guide said that was nonsense; but she reduced him to silence by quoting a case in point.  She said, too, that if a man slipped and fell, there was nothing to prevent him from going helplessly down a run of ice into a subterranean watercourse, which would carry him for two or three leagues underground; and on this head our boy had no counter-statement to make.  She asserted that without ladders it was utterly impossible to make the descent to the commencement of the glaciere; and she vowed there was no ladder now, nor had been for some time.  Here the boy came in, stating that the cave belonged to a mademoiselle of Neufchatel, who had a summer cottage at no great distance, and loved to be supplied with ice during her residence in the country, for which purpose she kept a sound ladder on the spot, and had it removed in the winter that it might not be destroyed.  There was a circumstantial air about this statement which for the moment got the better of the old woman; but she speedily recovered herself, and repeated positively that there was no ladder of any description, adding, somewhat inconsequently, that it was such a bad one, no Christian could use it with safety.  The boy retorted, that it was all very well for her to run the glaciere down, as she lived near it, but for the world from a distance it was a most wonderful sight; and, as for the ladder, he happened to know that it was at this time in excellent preservation.  The event proved that in saying this he drew entirely upon his imagination.  It is, perhaps, only fair to suppose that they don’t mean anything by it, and it may be mere ignorance on their part; but the simple fact is, that some of those Swiss rustics tell the most barefaced lies conceivable,—­unblushing is an epithet that cannot be safely applied without previous soap and water,—­and tell them in a plodding systematic manner which takes in all but the experienced and wary traveller.  I have myself learned to suspend my judgment regarding the most simple thing in nature, until I have other grounds for forming an opinion than the solemn asseverations of the most stolid and respectable Swiss, if it so be that money depends upon his report.[51]

As in the case of two of the glacieres already described, the entrance is by a deep pit, which has the appearance of having been at one time two pits, one less deep than the other; and the barrier between the two having been removed by some natural process, a passage is found down the steep side of the shallower pit, which lands the adventurer on a small sloping shelf, 21 feet sheer above the surface of the snow in the deeper