Chapter 2 THE GLACIèRE OF S. GEORGES, IN THE JURA.

The best way of reaching this glacière from Geneva would be to take the steamer to Rolle, or the train to one of the neighbouring stations, between Geneva and Lausanne, and thence pass up the slope of the Jura by the road which leads through Gimel. For the train, the Allaman station would be the most convenient, as an omnibus runs from Allaman to Aubonne, where the poste for Gimel may be caught.

But from Arzier there is a short cut of less than two hours along the side of the hills, leaving that village by a deep gorge not unfitly named L'Enfer, and a dark wood which retains an odour of more savage bygone times in its name of the 'Bear's Wood,' as containing a cavern where an old bear was detected in the act of attempting to winter.[12]

The village of S. Georges has very respectable accommodation for a single traveller, au Cavalier. The common day-room will be found untenable by most Englishmen, however largely they may delight in rough quarters; but there is a double-bedded room at the end of a bricked passage up-stairs, which serves well for bedroom and sitting-room in one. The chief drawback in this arrangement is, that the landlady inexorably removes all washing apparatus during the day, holding that a pitcher and basin are unseemly ornaments for a sitting-room. The deal table, of course, serves both for dressing and for feeding purposes, but it is fortunately so long that an end can be devoted to each; and on the whole it is possible to become considerably attached to the room, with its three airy windows, and the cool unceasing hum of a babbling fountain in the village-street below. The Auberge is a large building, with a clock-tower of considerable height, containing the clock of the commune: as soon as the candle is put out at night, it becomes painfully evident that a rectangular projection in one corner of the room is in connection with this tower, and in fact forms a part of the abode of the pendulum, which plods on with audible vigour, growing more and more audible as the hours pass on, and making a stealthy pervading noise, as if a couple of lazy ghosts were threshing phantom wheat. The clocks of Vaud, too, are in the habit of striking the hour twice, with a short interval; so that if anyone is not sure what the clock meant the first time, he has a second chance of counting the strokes. This is no doubt an admirable plan under ordinary circumstances, but it does certainly try the patience of a sleepless dyspeptic after a surfeit of café-au-lait and honey; and when he has counted carefully the first time, and is bristling with the consciousness that it is only midnight, it is aggravating in the extreme to have the long slow story told a second time within a few feet of his head.

The Cavalier had retained a guide overnight, Henri Renaud by name, and he appeared punctually at eight o'clock in the morning, got up in the short-tail coat of the country, and a large green umbrella with mighty ribs of whalebone. The weather was extremely unpleasant, a cold pitiless rain rendering all attempts at protection unavailing; but, fortunately, the glacière is only an hour and a quarter from the village. The path is tolerably steep, leading across the petit Pré de Rolle, and through woods of beech and fir, till the summit of one of the minor ridges of the Jura is reached, whence a short descent leads to the mouth of the glacière, something more than 4,000 feet above the sea. The ground here slopes down towards the north; and on the slope, among fir-trees, an irregular circular basin is seen, some seven or eight yards across,[13] and perhaps two yards deep, at the bottom of which are two holes. One of these holes is open, and as the guide and I--for my sisters remained at Arzier--stood on the neck of ground between the holes, we could see the snow lying at the bottom of the cave; the other is covered with trunks of trees, laid over the mouth to prevent the rays of the sun from striking down on to the ice. This protection has become necessary in consequence of an incautious felling of wood in the immediate neighbourhood of the mouth, which has exposed the ice to the assaults of the weather. The commune has let the glacière for a term of nine years, receiving six or seven hundred francs in all; and the fermier extracts the ice, and sells it in Geneva and Lausanne. In hot summers, the supplies of the artificial ice-houses fail; and then the hotel-keepers have recourse to the stores laid up for them by nature in the Glacières of S. Georges and S. Livres. Hence the importance of protecting the ice; the necessity for so doing arising in this case from the fact that the entrance to the cave is by a hole in the roof, which exposes the ice to direct radiation, unlike all other glacières, excepting perhaps the Cueva del Hielo on the Peak of Teneriffe.[14]

Autumn appears to be the usual time for cutting the ice, when it is carried from the cave on men's backs as far as the commencement of the rough mountain-road, and is there packed on chars, and so conveyed to the nearest railway station. Renaud had worked in the cave for two years, and asserted that they did not choose the night for carrying the ice down to the station, and did not even care to choose a cool day. He believed that, in the autumn of 1863, they loaded two chars a day for fifteen days, and each char took from 40 to 50 quintaux; the quintal containing 50 kilos, or 100 livres.[15] In Professor Pictet's time (1822) this glacière supplied the Hospital of Geneva, whose income depended in part on its privilege of revente of all ice sold in the town, with 25 quintaux every other day during the summer. In my anxiety to learn the exact amount of ice now supplied by the glacière, I determined to find out the fermier; but Renaud could tell nothing of him beyond the fact that he lived in Geneva, which some promiscuous person supplemented by the information that his name was Boucqueville, and that he had something to do with comestibles. On entering upon a hunt for M. Boucqueville a fortnight later, it turned out that no one had heard of such a person, and the Directory professed equal ignorance; but, under the head of 'Comestibles,' there appeared a Gignoux-Bocquet, No. 34, Marché. Thirty-four, Marché, said, yes--M. Bocquet--it was quite true: nevertheless, it was clear that monsieur meant Sebastian a?né, on the Molard. The Molard knew only a younger Sebastian, but suggested that the right man was probably M. Gignoux-Chavaz, over the way; and when it was objected that Gignoux-Bocquet, and not Gignoux-Chavaz, was the name, the Molard replied that it made no matter,--Chavaz or Bocquet, it was all the same. When M. Gignoux-Chavaz was found, he said that he certainly was a man who had something to do with a glacière, but, instead of farming the Glacière of S. Georges, he had only bought a considerable quantity of ice two years ago from the Glacière of S. Livres, and he did not believe that the fermier of S. Georges lived in Geneva. Part of the confusion was due to the custom of placing a wife's maiden name after her husband's name: thus Gignoux-Chavaz implies that a male Gignoux has married a female Chavaz; and when a Swiss marries an English lady with a very English name, the result in the Continental mouth is sufficiently curious.

On arriving at the entrance to the glacière, the end of a suggestive ladder is seen under the protecting trunks; and after one or two steps have been taken down the ladder, the effect of the cave below is extremely remarkable, the main features being a long wall covered thickly with white ice in sheets, a solid floor of darker-coloured ice, and a high pyramid of snow reaching up towards the uncovered hole already spoken of. The atmosphere of the cave is damp, and this causes the ladders to fall speedily to decay, so that they are by no means to be trusted: indeed, an early round gave way under one of my sisters, when they visited the cave with me in 1861, and suggested a clear fall of 60 feet on to a cascade of ice.[16] There are three ladders, one below the other, and a hasty measurement gave their lengths as 20, 16, and 28 feet. The rock-roof is only a few feet thick in the neighbourhood of the hole of entrance.

ENTRANCE TO THE GLACIèRE OF S. GEORGES.

The total length of the cave is 110 feet, lying NE. and SW., in the line of the main chain of the Jura. The lowest part of the floor is a sea of ice of unknown depth, 45 feet long by 15 broad; and Renaud tried my powers of belief by asserting that in 1834 the level of this floor was higher by half the height of the cave than now; a statement, however, which is fully borne out by Professor Pictet's measurements in 1822, when the depth of the glacière was less than 30 feet. Indeed, the floor had sunk considerably since my previous visit, when it was all at the same level down to the further end of the cave; whereas now, as will be seen in the section, there was a platform of stones resting on ice at that end. There are two large fissures passing into the rock, one only of which can be represented in the section, and these were full of white ice, not owing its whiteness apparently to the admixture of air in bubbles, but firm and compact, and very hard, almost like porcelain. Small stalactites hung from round fissures in the roof, formed of the same sort of ice, and broken off short, much as the end of a leaden pipe is sometimes seen to project from a wall. With this exception, there was no ice hanging from the roof, though there were abundant signs of very fine columns which had already yielded to the advancing warmth: one of these still remained, in the form of broken blocks of ice, in the neighbourhood of the open hole in the roof, immediately below which hole the stones of the floor were completely bare, and the thermometer stood at 50°. At the far end of the cave, the thermometer gave something less than 32°; a difference so remarkable, at the same horizontal level, that I am inclined to doubt the accuracy of the figures, though they were registered on the spot with due care. The uncovered hole, it must be remembered, is so large, and so completely open, that the rain falls freely on to the stones on the floor below.

By far the most striking part of this glacière is the north-west wall, which is covered with a sheet of ice 70 feet long, and 22 feet high at the highest part: in the neighbourhood of the ladders, this turns the corner of the cave, and passes up for about 9 feet under the second ladder. The general thickness of the sheet is from a foot to a foot and a half; and this is the chief source from which the fermier draws the ice, as it is much more easily quarried than the solid floor. Some of my friends went to the cave a few weeks after my visit, and found that the whole sheet had been pared off and carried away.

VERTICAL SECTIONS OF THE GLACIèRE OF S. GEORGES.

On some parts of the wall the sheet was not completely continuous, being formed of broad and distinct cascades, connected by cross channels of ice, and uniting at their upper and lower ends, thus presenting many curious and ornamental groupings. On cutting through this ice, it was found not to lie closely on the rock, a small intermediate space being generally left, almost filled with minute limestone particles in a very wet state; and the whole cavern showed signs of more or less thaw.

It was natural to examine the structure of the ice in this glacière, after what we had observed on La Genollière. The same prismatic structure was universal in the sheet on the wall, and in the blocks which lay here and there on the floor and formed the sole remains of former columns. It was to be observed also in many parts of the ice-floor itself. The base of one large column still remained standing in its original position, and its upper end presented a tolerably accurate horizontal section of the column. The centre was composed of turbid ice, round which limpid prisms were horizontally arranged, diverging like the feathers of a fan; then came a ring of turbid ice, and then a second concentric ring of limpid prisms, diverging in the same manner as those which formed the inner ring. There were in all three or four of these concentric rings, the details showing a considerable amount of confusion and interference: the general law, however, was most evident, and has held in all the similar columns which I have since examined in other glacières. The rings were not accurately circular, but presented rather the appearance of having been formed round a roughly-fluted pillar on an elliptical base.

The examination of the ice on the wall gave some curious results. The horizontal arrangement of the prisms, which we had found to prevail in vertical columns, was here modified to suit the altered conditions of the case, and the axes of the prisms changed their inclination so as to be always perpendicular to the surface on which the ice lay, as far as could be determined by the eye. Thus, in following the many changes of inclination of the wall, the axes of the prisms stood at many different angles with the vertical, from a horizontal position where the wall chanced to be vertical, to a vertical position on the horizontal ledges of the rock. The extreme edges, too, of the ice, presented a very peculiar appearance. The general thickness, as has been said, varied from a foot to a foot and a half; and this diminished gradually along horizontal lines, till, at the edges of the sheet, where the ice ceased, it became of course nothing. The extreme edge was formed of globular or hemispherical beads of ice, like the freezing of a sweating-stone, lying so loosely on the rock that I could sweep them off in detail with one hand, and catch them with the other as they fell. Passing farther on towards the thicker parts of the ice, these beads stood up higher and higher, losing their roundness, and becoming compressed into prisms of all shapes, in very irregular imitation of the cellular tissue in plants, the axes of the prisms following the generally-observed law. There seems to be nothing in this phenomenon which cannot be accounted for by the supposition of gradual thaw of small amount being applied to a sheet of prismatic ice.

One fact was remarkable from its universal appearance. Wherever an incision was made in this sheet of ice, the prisms snapped off at the depth of an inch, and could be mowed down like corn by means of a stout knife. Although they broke naturally at this constant depth, and left a surface of limpid ice without any signs of external or internal division, still the laminae obtained by chiselling this lower surface carefully, broke up regularly into the shapes to be expected in sections of prisms cut at right angles to the axis. The roughness of my instruments made it impossible to discover how far this extended, and whether it ceased to be the case at any given depth in the ice.

The sea of ice on the floor was in a very wet state at the surface, being at a lower level than the stones on to which the rain from the open hole fell; and here the prismatic structure was not apparent to the eye, nor do I know whether it existed at all. In the Glacière of La Genollière I carried a large block of perfectly prismatic ice into the outer cave, where it was exposed to the free currents of air passing from the pit of entrance to the hole newly opened by the falling in of the ground; and, two days after, the external lines were scarcely perceptible, while on the occasion of our third visit I found that they had entirely disappeared, and the whole block was rapidly following their example. This disappearance of the surface-lines under the action of atmospheric thaw is probably the same thing as their absence when the flooring of ice is thinly covered with water. Wherever the flooring rose slightly towards the edges of the sea of ice, the usual structure appeared again.

There were no currents of air in the cave, the candles burning steadily through the whole time of our visit. Excepting for the purpose of detecting disturbance in the air, there is no need of candles, as the two holes in the roof supply sufficient light. Some account of the careful observations made here by M. Thury, at different seasons of the year, will be found in other parts of this book. We passed, on our return, by the source of water which springs from the foot of a rock at some distance from the glacière, and is supposed to form the outlet for the drainage of the cave; but it is difficult to understand how this can be the case, considering the form and character of the intervening ground.

The two ice-caves so far described are the least interesting of all that I have visited; but a peasant informed me, a day or two after, that if we had penetrated to the back of the pyramid of snow which lay half under the open hole, being the remains of the large collection which is formed there in the winter, we might have found a deep pit which is sometimes exposed by the melting of the snow. He had some idea that its depth was 30 feet a few years ago, and that its sides were solid ice. I shall have occasion to mention such pits in another glacière; if one does exist here, it has probably been quarried in the ice by the drops from the hole in the roof, and there might be some interest attached to an attempt to investigate it.[17]

We reached S. Georges again in a wretched state of wet and cold, and Renaud went off to bed, and imbibed abundant and super-abundant kirsch,--at least, when drawn thence the next morning, his manner left no doubt about either the fact or the abundance of the potations overnight. Warned by many experiences, I had gone no nearer to a specification of the bill of fare than a vague suggestion that quelque chose must be forthcoming, with an additional stipulation that this must be something more than mere onions and fat. The landlady's rendering of quelque chose was very agreeable, but, for the benefit of future diners au Cavalier, it is as well to say that those who do not like anisette had better make a private arrangement with their hostess, otherwise they will swallow with their soup an amount sufficient for many generations of the drag: they may also safely order savoury rice, with browned veal and wine-sauce, which is evidently a strong point with the Cavalier. All meals there are picturesque; for the omelette lay on the Castle of Grandson and a part of the Lake of Neufchatel, while the butter reposed on the ruined Cathedral of Sion, and the honey distilled pleasantly from the comb on to the walls of Wufflens. No one should put any trust in the spoons, which are constructed apparently of pewter shavings in a chronic state of semi-fusion. On the evening of the second day, the landlady allowed a second knife at tea, as the knife-of-all-work had begun to knock up under the heavy strain upon its powers; but this supplementary instrument was of the ornamental kind, and, like other ornamental things, broke down at a crisis, which took the form of a piece of crust.

Lest this account should raise anyone's expectations too high, it is as well to add that they have no snuffers in S. Georges, beyond such as Nature provided when she gave men fingers; and they burn attenuated tallow candles with full-bodied wicks. Also, the tea is flavoured with vanille, unless that precious flavouring is omitted by private contract.

* * *