friends, and the account of what they had gone through was by no means
inviting, seeing that the prevailing material was damp clay of a solid
character, arranged in steep slopes, up which progression must be made
by inserting the fingers and toes as far as might be into the clay; and,
of course, when the handful of unpleasant mud came away, the result was
the reverse of progression. To anyone who has only known the rope up the
pure white side of some snow mountain, the idea of being roped for the
purpose of grappling with underground banks of adhesive mud and clay
must be horrible in the extreme. Another interesting natural phenomenon
is presented by the source of the Reuse, that river gushing out from the
rock in considerable volume, probably formed by the drainage of the Lake
of Etallières, in the distant valley of La Brévine; while the
Longe-aigue, on the contrary, is lost in a gulf of such horror that the
people call the mill which stands on its edge the _Moulin d'enfer_.

As usual, we were assured that many of these remarkable sights were far
better worth a visit than the glacière, of which no one seemed to know
anything. A guide was at length secured for the next morning, who had
made his way to the cave once in the winter-time and had been unable to
enter it, and we settled down quietly to an evening of perfect rest. The
windows of the bedrooms being guiltless of blinds and curtains, the
effect of waking, in the early morning, to find them blocked up, as it
were, by the green slopes of pasture and the dark bands of fir-woods
which clothed the limiting hills, seemed almost magical, the foreground
being occupied solely by the graceful curve of the dome of the
church-tower, glittering with intercepted rays, and forming a bright
omen for the day thus ushered in.

In due time the promised guide appeared, a sickly boy of unprepossessing
appearance, and of _patois_ to correspond. I was at first tempted to