Chapter 8 THE GLACIèRE AND NEIGIèRE OF ARC-SOUS-CICON.

The beauties of the Val de Travers end only with the valley itself, at the head of which a long tunnel ushers the traveller into a tamer country,--a preparation, as it were, for France. After the border is passed, the scenery begins to improve again, and the effect of the two castles of Joux, the new and the old, crowning the heights on either side of the narrow gorge through which the railway runs, is very fine.

The guide-books inform us that the Chateau of Joux was the place of imprisonment of the unfortunate Toussaint L'Ouverture, and that there he died of neglect and cold; and it was in the same strong fortress that Mirabeau was confined by his father's desire. The old castle, however, is more interesting from its connection with the history of Charles the Bold, who retired to La Rivière after the battle of Morat, and spent here those sad solitary weeks of which Philip de Comines tells with so many moral reflections; weeks of bodily and mental distress, which left him a mere wreck, and led to his wild want of generalship and his miserable death at Nancy. He had melted down the church-bells in this part of Burgundy and Vaud, to make cannon for the final effort which failed so fatally at Morat; and the old chroniclers relate--without any allusion to the sacrilege--that the artillery was wretchedly served on that cruel[54] day. It is some comfort to Englishmen to know that their ancestors under the Duke of Somerset displayed a marvellous courage on the occasion.

We reached Pontarlier in time for a stroll through the quiet town; but we searched in vain for the tempting convents and gates, which were marked on my copy of an old plan of the place, dedicated to the Prince d'Arenberg, in the well-known times when he governed the Franche Comté. The convents had become for the most part breweries, and the gates had been improved away. Our enquiries respecting the place of our destination were fortunately more successful. The idea of a glacière was new to the world of Pontarlier; but the landlord of the H?tel National had heard of Arc-sous-Cicon, and had no doubt that we could find a carriage of some sort to take us there. His own horses were all engaged in haymaking, but his neighbours' horses might be less busy, and accordingly he took us first to call upon M. Paget, a friend who added to his income by keeping a horse and voiture for hire. The Pagets in general had gone to bed, and the door was fastened; but our guide seemed to know the ways of the house, and we found Madame in the stables, and arranged with her for a carriage at seven o'clock the next morning.

At the time appointed, M. Paget did not come, and I was obliged to go and look him up. He proved to me that it was all right, somehow, and evidently understood that his convenience, not ours, was the thing to be consulted. The hotel is in a narrow street, and, apparently on that account, a stray passer-by was caught, and pressed into M. Paget's service to help to turn the carriage,--a feat accomplished by a bodily lifting of the hinder part, with its wheels. After-experience showed that the narrowness of the street had nothing to with it, and we discovered that the necessity for the manoeuvre was due to a chronic affection of some portion of the voiture; so that whenever in the course of the day it became necessary for us to turn round, M. Paget was constrained to call in foreign help.

The country through which we passed was uninteresting in the extreme, although we had been told by the landlord that our drive would introduce us to a succession of natural beauties such as few countries in the world could show. The line of hills, at the foot of which we expected our route to lie, looked exceedingly tempting as seen from Pontarlier; but, to our disappointment, we left the hills and struck across the plain. About ten or eleven kilomètres from Pontarlier, however, the character of the country changed suddenly, and we found the landlord's promise in some part fulfilled. Rich meadow-slopes were broken by solitary trees arranged in Nature's happiest style, and grey precipices of Jurane grimness and perpendicularity encroached upon the woods and grass. We were coming near the source of the Loue, M. Paget said, which it would be necessary for us to visit. He told us that we must leave the carriage at an auberge on the roadside, and walk to the neighbouring village of Ouhans, which was inaccessible for voitures, and thence we should easily find our way to the source. The distance, he declared, was twenty minutes. The woman at the auberge strongly recommended the source, but did her best to dissuade us from the glacières, of which she said there were two. She had visited them herself, and told her husband, who had guided her, that there was nothing to see. That, we thought, proved nothing against the glacières, and her dulness of appreciation we were willing to accept without further proof than her personal appearance. Besides, to go to the source, and not to Arc, would mean dining with her; so that she was not an impartial adviser.

M. Paget was a short square man, of very few words, and his one object in life seemed to be to save his black horse as much as possible; a very creditable object in itself, so long as he did not go too far in his endeavours to accomplish it. On the present occasion he certainly did go too far. The road was quite as good as that which we had left, and there was no reason in the world why the carriage should not have taken us to the village. Worse still, we discovered eventually that the 'twenty minutes' meant twenty minutes from the village to the source, and represented really something like half the time necessary for that part of the march, while there was a hot and dusty walk of half an hour before we reached the village. As he accompanied us in person, we had the satisfaction of frequently telling him our mind with insular frankness. He pretended to be much distressed, but assured us each time we returned to the charge--about every quarter of an hour--that we were close to the desired spot. From the village to the source, the way led us through such pleasant scenery and such acceptable strawberries, that we only kept up our periodical remonstrances on principle, and, after we had wound rapidly down through a grand defile, and turned a sudden angle of the rock, the first sight of that which we had come to see amply repaid us all the trouble we had gone through. The source of the Orbe is sufficiently striking, but the Loue is by far more grand at the moment of its birth. The former is a bright fairy-like stream, gushing out of a small cavern at the foot of a lofty precipice clothed with clinging trees; but the Loue flows out from the bottom of an amphitheatrical rock much more lofty and unbroken. The stream itself is broader and deeper, and glides with an infinitely more majestic calmness from a vast archway in the rock, into the recesses of which the eye can penetrate to the point where the roof closes in upon the water, and so cuts off all further view. The calmness of the flow may be in part attributed to a weir, which has been built across the stream at the mouth of the cave, for the purpose of driving a portion of the water into a channel which conveys it to various mill-wheels; for, at a very short distance below the weir, the natural stream makes a fall of 17 feet, so that, if left to itself, it might probably rush out more impetuously from its mysterious cavern. The weir is a single timber, below the surface, fixed obliquely across the stream on a shelving bank of masonry, and the farther end meets the wall of rock inside the cave. Near it we saw some glorious hart's-tongue ferns, which excited our desires, and I took off boots and stockings, and endeavoured to make my way along the weir; but the face of the masonry was so very slippery, and the nails in the timber so unpleasant for bare feet, and the stream was so unexpectedly strong, that I called to mind the proverbial definition of the better part of valour, and came back without having achieved the ferns. The biting coldness of the water, and the boiling of the fall close below the weir, did not add to my confidence in making the attempt, but I should think that in a more favourable state of the water the cave might be very well explored by two men going alone. The day penetrated so completely into the farthest corners, that when I got half-way along the weir, I could detect the oily look on the surface where it first saw the light, which showed where the water was quietly streaming up from its unknown sources. The people in the neighbourhood were unable to suggest any lake or lakes of which this river might be the subterranean drainage. It is liable to sudden and violent overflows, which seldom last more than twenty-four hours; and from the destruction of property caused by these outbursts, the name of La Loue, sc. La Louve, has been given to it. The rocky valley through which the river runs, after leaving its underground channel, is exceedingly fine, and we wandered along the precipices on one side, enjoying the varying scenes so much that we could scarcely bring ourselves to turn; each bend of the fretting river showing a narrow gorge in the rock, with a black rapid, and a foaming fall. It is said that although the mills on the Doubs are sometimes stopped from want of water, those which derive their motive power from this strange and impressive cavern have never known the supply to fail.

Before we started for our ramble among the woods and precipices which overhang the farther course of the Loue, we had sent off M. Paget to the auberge, with strict orders that he should at once get out the black horse, and bring the carriage to meet us at Ouhans, as one of us was not in so good order for walking as usual, and the day was fast slipping away. Of course we saw nothing of him when we reached Ouhans; and as it was not prudent to wait for his arrival there, which might never take place, we walked through the broiling sun in the direction of the auberge, and at last saw him coming, pretending to whip his horse as if he were in earnest about the pace. We somewhat sullenly assisted him to turn the old carriage round, and then bade him drive as hard as he could to Arc-sous-Cicon, still a long way off. This he said he would do if he knew which was the way; but since he was last there, as a much younger man, there had been a general change in the matter of roads, and how the new ones lay he did not know. This was not cheerful intelligence, especially as we had set our hearts upon getting back to Pontarlier in time for the evening train, which would give us a night at the charming Bellevue at Neufchatel, instead of the poisonous coffee and the trying odours of the National: the old man's instinct, however, led him right, and we reached Arc at half-past twelve. One obstacle to our journey on the new road promised at first to be insurmountable, being an immense sapin, the largest I have seen felled, which lay on a combination of wood-chairs straight across the road. It had been brought down a narrow side-road through a wheat-field, and one end occupied this road, while the other was jammed against the wall on the opposite side of the main road; and half-a-dozen men, with as many draught oxen, were mainly endeavouring to turn it in the right direction. M. Paget knew how much was required to turn his own carriage, and he calculated that the road would not be free for two or three hours, which involved a rest for his black horse, a pipe for himself, and, possibly, a short sleep. The oxen were lazy, and their hides impervious; the whips were cracked in vain, and in vain were brought more directly to bear upon the senses of the recusants; the men howled, and rattled the chains, and re-arranged the clumsy head-gear, but all to no purpose. The man who did most of the howling was a black Burgundian dwarf, in a long blouse and moustaches; and he did it in so frightful a patois, that the oxen were right in their refusal to understand. We represented to M. Paget that it would be possible to make our way through the wheat; but he declared himself perfectly happy where he was, and declined to take any steps in the matter; whereupon I assumed the command of the expedition, and led the horse through the corn, thus turning the flank of the sapin and its attendants. Our driver submitted to this act of violence much as a member of the Society of Friends allows a chamberlain to remove his hat from behind when he is favoured with an audience of the sovereign; and when we regained the high road, he meekly took up the reins and drove us at a good pace to Arc.

The village lies in a curiously open plain, with a girdle of hills, in one of which the glacières were supposed to lie. The first auberge refused us admittance, on the ground that the dinner was all pre-engaged, and the result was that we found a pleasanter place higher up the village, near a vast new maison de ville with every window shattered by recent hail. The people groaned over the unnecessary expense of this huge building, which might well, from its size, have been a home for the whole village; and they told us that the communal forests had been terribly over-cut to provide the money for it. Our first demand was for food; our next, for a guide to the glacières. Food we could have; but why should we wish to go to the glacières, when there was so much else worth seeing at a little distance?--a guide might without doubt be found, but there was nothing to be seen when we got there. We ordered prompt dinner, anything that happened to be ready, and desired the landlord to look out for a man to show us the way up the hills. When the dinner came, it was cold; and the main dish consisted apparently of something which had made stock for many generations of soup, and had then been kept in a half-warm state, ready to be heated for any passer-by who called for hot meat, till the cook had despaired of its ever being used, and had allowed it to become cold: at least, no other supposition seemed to account for its utter want of flavour, and the wonderful development of its fibres. As a matter of politeness, I asked the man what it was; when he took the dish from the table, smelled at it, and pronounced it veal.

There were also several specimens of the original old turnip-radish, with large shrubs of heads, and mature feelers many inches long. As all this was not very inviting, we ordered an omelette and some cheese; and when the omelette came, we found that the cook had combined our ideas and understood our order to mean a cheese-omelette, which was not so bad after all.

By this time, the landlord's visit to his drinking-room had procured a man willing to act as our guide. He was, unfortunately, more willing than able; for his sojourn in the drinking-room had told upon his powers of equilibrium. He asserted, as every one seemed in all cases to assert, that neither rope nor axe was in any way necessary. When I pressed the rope, he said that if monsieur was afraid he had better not go; so we told the landlord privately that the man was rather too drunk for a guide, and we must have another. The landlord thereupon offered himself, at the suggestion of his wife, who seemed to be the chief partner in the firm, and we were glad to accept his offer; while the incapacitated man whom we had rejected acquiesced in the new arrangement with a bow so little withering, and with such genuine politeness, that, in spite of his over-much wine, he won my heart. The landlord himself did not profess to know the glacières; but he knew the man who lived nearest to them, and proposed to lead us to his friend's chalet, whence we should doubtless be able to find a guide.

We stole a few moments for an inspection of the Church of Arc, and found, to our surprise, some very pleasing paintings in good repair, and open sittings which looked unusually clean and neat. Then we crossed the plain towards the north, and proceeded to grapple with a stiff path through the woods which climb the first hills. It turned out that there was no one available for our purpose in the chalet to which the landlord led us; but a small child was despatched in search of the master or the domestic, and returned before long with the latter individual, who received the mistress's instruction respecting the route, and received also an axe which I had begged in case of need. The accounts we had heard of the glacière or glacières--every one declined to call them caves--were so various, and the total denials of their existence so many, that we quietly made up our minds to disappointment, and agreed that what we had seen at the source of the Loue was quite sufficient to repay us for the trouble we had taken; while the idea of a rapid raid into France had something attractive in it, which more than counterbalanced the old charms of Soleure. Besides, we found that we were now in a good district for flowers, and the abundant Gnaphalium sylvaticum brought back to our minds many a delightful scramble in glacier regions, where its lovely velvet kinsman the pied-de-lion grows. On the broad top of the range of hills, covered with rich grass, we came upon large patches of a plant, with scented leaves and pungent seeds, which we had not known before, Meum athamanticum, and, to please our guide, we went through the form of pretending that we rather liked its taste. My sisters were in ecstasies of triumph over a wild everlasting-pea, which grew here to a considerable height--Lathyrus sylvestris, they said, Fr. Gesse sauvage, distinct from G. hétéropyhlle, which is still larger, and is almost confined to a favourite place of sojourn with us, the little Swiss valley of Les Plans. It is said that on the top of these hills springs of water rise to the surface, though there is no higher ground in the neighbourhood; a phenomenon which has been accounted for by the supposition of a difference of specific gravity between these springs and the waters which drive them up.

The character of the ground on the plateau changed suddenly, and we passed at one step, apparently, from a meadow of flowers to a wilderness of fissured rock, lying white and skeleton-like in the afternoon sun. We only skirted this rock in the first instance, and made for a clump of trees some little way off, in which we found a deep pit, with a path of sufficient steepness leading to the bottom. Here we came to a collection of snow, much sheltered by overhanging rocks and trees; and this, our guide told us, was the neigière, a word evidently formed on the same principle as glacière. The snow was half-covered with leaves, and was unpleasantly wet to our feet, so that we did not spend much time on it, or rather in it. A huge fragment of rock had at some time or other fallen from overhead, and now occupied a large part of the sloping bottom of the pit: by squeezing myself through a narrow crevice between this and the live rock, which looked as if it ought to lead to something, I found a veritable ice-cave, unhappily free from ornament, and of very small size, like a round soldier's tent in shape, with walls of rock and floor of ice. We afterwards found an easier entrance to the cave; but the floor was so wet, and the constant drops of water from the roof so little agreeable, that we got out again as soon as possible, 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 were the reasons he gave, but evidently his soul was imbued with a deep obedience to that better half, and the offering of a block of ice was suggested by a complication of feelings. When we reached the auberge again, we found the rejected guide still there, and more unstable than before. The general impression on his mind seemed to be that he had been wronged, and had forgiven us. In our absence he had been meditating upon the glacière, and his imagination had brought him to a very exalted idea of its wonders. Whereas, in the former part of the day, he had stoutly asserted that no cord could possibly be necessary, he now vehemently affirmed that if I had but taken him as guide, he would have let me down into holes 40 mètres deep, where I should have seen such things as man had never seen before. Had monsieur seen the source of the Loue? Yes, monsieur had. Very fine, was it not? Yes, very fine. Which did monsieur then prefer--the glacière, or the source? The source, infinitely. Then it was clear monsieur had not seen the glacière:--he was sure before that monsieur had not, now it was quite clear, for in all the world there was nothing like that glacière. The Loue!--one might rather see the glacière once, than live by the source of the Loue all the days of one's life.

It was now five o'clock, and the train left Pontarlier at half-past seven. We represented to M. Paget that he really ought to do the twenty kilomètres in two hours and a quarter, which would leave us a quarter of an hour to arrange our knapsacks and pay the National. He promised to do his best, and certainly the black horse proved himself a most willing beast. There was one long hill which damped our spirits, and made us give up the idea of catching the train; and here our driver came to the rescue with what sounded at first like a promising story--the only one we extracted from him all through the day--à propos of a memorial-stone on the road-side, where a man had lately been killed by two bears; but, when we came to examine into it, the romance vanished, for the man was a brewer's waggoner with a dray of beer, and the bears were tame bears, led in a string, which frightened the brewer's horses, and so the man was killed. Contrary to our expectations and fears, we did catch the train, and arrived in a thankful frame of mind at comfortable quarters in Neufchatel.

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