and very properly put a prompt strain upon the rope, which reduced his Herr to a spread-eagle sort of condition, in which it was difficult to explain matters, so as to procure a release.  When that was accomplished, I saw it would be easy to reach the point where the ice met the wall, so I called to Christian to come down, which he did in an unpremeditated, avalanche fashion; and then, by cutting steps here and there, and making use of odd points of rock, we skirted down the edge of the great fall, and reached at last the lower regions.

When I came to read Dufour’s account of his visit in 1822, I found that the ice must have increased very much since his time.  He uses sufficiently large words, speaking of the vaste, horrible et pourtant magnifique—­of the horreur du sejour, and the grandeur des demeures souterraines; but he only calls the glorious ice-fall a plan incline, and says that the whole was less remarkable for the amount of ice, than for the characteristics indicated by the words I have quoted.  He says that it required une assez forte dose de courage to slip down to the stone of which I have spoken; the fact being that at the time of my visit it would have been impossible to do so with any chance of stopping oneself, for the flat surface of the stone was all but even with the ice.  M. Soret, who saw the cave in 1860, determined that cords were then absolutely necessary for the descent, which he did not attempt; and the only Englishman I have met who has seen this cave, tells me that he and his party went no farther than the edge of the fall.[62] Probably each year’s accumulation on the upper floor of ice has added to the height and rapidity of the fall; but at any rate, when Dufour was there, des militaires—­as he dashingly tells—­were not to be stopped, and he and his party—­such of them as had not been already stopped by the precipices outside—­let themselves slip down to the stone, and thence descended as we did.

We soon found that the larger ice-fall looked extremely grand when seen from below, and that in a modified form it reached far down into the lower cave, and terminated in a level sea of ice; but, before making any further investigations into its size, we pressed on to look for the end of the cave.  This soon appeared, and as a commentary on Christian’s assertion that no one had ever been beyond the head of the fall, I called his attention to some initials smoked on the wall by means of a torch.  There was an abrupt piece of rock-floor between this end and the termination of the ice.  The western wall was ornamented with a long arcade of lofty columns of very white ice, looking strangely ghostlike by the light of two candles, crystallised, and with the porcelain appearance I have described before.  We could not measure the height of these columns, but we found that they extended continuously, so as to be in fact one sheet of columns, connected by shapes of ice now graceful and now grotesque, for 27 yards.  The ice from their feet flowed down to join the terminal lake, which formed a weird sea 28 yards by 14.  My notes, written on the spot, tell me that between this lake, which I have called terminal, and the end of the cave, there is a sheet of ice 48 yards long, but it has entirely vanished from my recollection.