wished to determine the length of the fall. While he was making his way
up, I amused myself by chopping and carving at the ice at various
points to examine its structure, until at length a _Jodel_ from above
announced that Christian had reached his post; and a vast amount of
hammering ensued, of which I could not understand the meaning. Presently
he called out that 'it' was coming, and assuredly it did come. There was
a loud crash on the upper part of the fall, and a shower of fragments of
ice came whizzing past, and almost dislodged me; while the sound of
pieces of ice bounding and gliding down the slope seemed as if it never
would cease. It turned out to mean that my friend had not been able to
find a stone; so he had smashed a block of ice from the column which
presided over the fall, and having attached the string to this, had
hurled the whole apparatus in my direction, fortunately not doing as
much damage as he might have done. My end of the string was not to be
seen, so he repeated the experiment, with a piece of wood in place of
the block of ice, and this time it succeeded. We found that from top to
bottom of the fall was 45 yards. There was all the appearance of immense
thickness, especially towards the upper part.

Christian had placed his candle in a niche in the column, while he
arranged the string for measuring the fall, and the effect of the spark
of light at the top of the long steep slope was extremely strange from
below. The whole scene was so remarkable, that it required some effort
to realise the fact that I was not in a dream. Christian stood at the
top invisible, jodeling in a most unearthly manner, and developing an
astonishing falsetto power, only interrupting his performance to assure
me that he was not coming down again; so I was obliged to measure the
breadth of the fall by myself. I chose a part where the ice was not very
steep, and where occasional points of rock would save some of the labour
of cutting steps; but even so it was a sufficiently tedious business.