feet high, down which there seemed at first no means of passing; but finding an old ladder frozen into a part of the wall, we chopped out holes between the upper steps, and so descended, landing on a flooring composed of broken blocks and columns of ice, with a certain amount of what seemed to be drifted snow.  This wall of ice, which was 72 feet long and 22 feet high, was not vertical, but sloped the wrong way, caving in under the stream of ice; and from the projecting top of the wall a long fringe of vast icicles hung down, along the whole breadth of the fan.  The effect of this was, that we could walk between the ice-wall and the icicles as in a cloister, with solid ice on the one hand and Gothic arcades of ice on the other, the floor being likewise of ice, and the roof formed by the junction of the wall with the top of the icicle-arcade.  The floor of this cloister was not 22 feet below the top of the wall, for it formed the upper part of a gentle descending slope of ice, rounded off like a fall of water, which seemed to flow from the lower part of the wall; and the height of 22 feet is reckoned from the foot of this slope, which terminated at a few feet of horizontal distance from the foot of the wall.  The wall of ice was plainly marked with horizontal bands, corresponding, no doubt, to a number of years of successive deposits; sometimes a few leaves, but more generally a strip of minuter debris, signified the divisions between the annual layers.  There had been many columns of ice from fissures in the rock, but all had fallen except one large ice-cascade, which flowed from a hole in the side of the cave on to the main stream, about two-thirds of the distance down from the snow.  One particularly grand column had stood on the very edge of the ice-wall, and its remains now lay below.

The flooring of mingled ice and snow, on which we stood, sloped through about five vertical feet from the foot of the wall, and came to an end on broken rocks, from which the terminal wall of the cave sprang up.  The effect of the view from this point, as we looked up the long slope of ice to where the ladders and a small piece of sky were visible, was most striking.  The accompanying engraving is from a sketch which attempts to represent it; the reality is much less prim, and much more full of beautiful detail, but still the engraving gives a fair idea of the general appearance of the cave.

While I was occupied in making sketches and measurements, Mignot was engaged in chopping discontentedly at the floor, in two or three different places.  At length he seemed to find a place to his mind, and chopped perseveringly till his axe went through, and then he suggested that we should follow.  The hole was not tempting.  It opened into the blackest possible darkness, and Mignot thrust his legs through, feeling for a foothold, which, by lowering himself almost to his armpits, he soon discovered:  the foothold, however, proved to be a loose stone, which gave way