of the first ladder to this point is 177 feet. Here we were arrested
by a strange wall of ice 22 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 débris,
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