especially as this was not the glacière we had come to see.

When we reached the surface once more, the landlord and the domestic
both assured us that the _neigière_ was the great sight, the glacière
being nothing at all, but, such as it was, they would lead us to it.
They took us to the fissured rock mentioned above; and when we looked
down into the fissures, we saw that some of them were filled at the
bottom with ice. They were not the ordinary fissures, like the crevasses
of a glacier, but rather disconnected slits in the surface, opening into
larger chambers in the heart of the rock, where the ice lay. In one part
of this curious district the surface sank considerably, and showed
nothing but a tumbled collection of large stones and rocks, piled in a
most disorderly manner. By examining the neighbourhood of the larger of
these rocks, we found a burrow, down which one of the men and I made our
way, and thus, after some windings in the interior, reached a point from
which we could descend to the ice. The impression conveyed to my mind
by the whole appearance of the rock and ice was not unlike that of the
domes in the Glacière of Monthézy; only that now the lower part of the
dome was filled with ice, and we stood in the upper part. There were two
or three of these domes, communicating one with another, and in all I
found abundant signs of the prismatic structure, though no columns or
wall-decoration remained. My sisters were accomplished in the art of
burrowing, but they did not care to come down, and we soon rejoined
them, spending a little time in letting down lighted _bougies_ into the
various domes and fissures, in order to study the movements of the air,
but our experiments did not lead to much.

The landlord had evidently not believed in the existence of ice in
summer, and his first thought was to take some home to his wife, to
prove that we had reached the glacière and had found ice: such at least