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.

I now sent Christian back with a ball of string, up the steps we had cut
for the descent, with directions to get as near as he could to the top
of the main fall, and then send down a stone tied to the string, as I