Chapter 9 THE SCHAFLOCH, OR TROU-AUX-MOUTONS, NEAR THE LAKE OF THUN.

The next morning, my sisters went one way and I another; they to a valley in the south-west of Vaud, where our head-quarters were to be established for some weeks, and I to Soleure, where a Swiss savant had vaguely told us he believed there was a glacière to be seen. That town, however, denied the existence of any approach to such a thing, with a unanimity which in itself was suspicious, and with a want of imagination which I had not expected to find.

One man I really thought might be persuaded to know of some cave where there was or might be ice, but after a quarter of an hour's discussion he finally became immovable on the negative side. A Frenchman would certainly have been polite enough to accommodate facts to my desires. It was all the more annoying, because the Weissenstein stood overhead so engagingly, and I should have been only too glad to spend the night in the hotel there, if anyone had given me the slightest encouragement. I specially pointed at the neighbourhood of this hotel to my doubtful friend, as being likely for caves; but he was not in the pay of the landlord, and so failed to take the hint. There is a curious hole in which ice is found near Weissenstein in Carniola,[55] and it is not impossible that this may have originated the idea of a glacière near Soleure.

The Schweizerhof at Berne is a very comfortable resting-place; but, in spite of its various excellences, if a tired traveller is told that No. 53 is to be his room, he will do well to seek a bed elsewhere. No. 53 is a sort of closet to some other number, with a single window opening low on to the passage, and is adjudged to the unfortunate individual who arrives at that omnipresent crisis which raises the charge for bed-rooms, and silences all objections to their want of comfort--namely, when there is only one bed left in the house. In itself, No. 53 would be well enough; but the throne of the chambermaid is in the passage, by the side of the window, and the male attendant on that particular stage naturally gravitates to the same point, when the bells of the stage do not summon him elsewhere, and often enough when they do. This combination leads of course to local disturbances of a somewhat noisy character, and however entirely a sleepy man may in principle sympathise with the causes of the noise, it becomes rather hard to bear after midnight. The precise actors on the present occasion have, no doubt, quarrelled or set up a café before now, or perhaps have achieved both results by taking the latter first; but there is reason to believe that so long as the window of No. 53 is the seat of the chambermaid for the time being, so long will that room be--as the landlord neatly expressed it when a protest was made--etwas unruhig.

All Switzerland has been playing at soldiers for some time, and as we left Berne the next morning, we saw three or four hundred Federal men of war marching down the road which runs parallel with the rails. The three officers at the head of the column were elderly and stout; moreover, they were mounted, and that fact was evidently due rather to the meekness of their chargers than to the grip of their own legs. When they saw the train coming, they took prompt measures. They halted the troops, and rode off down a side lane to be out of harm's way; and when we had well passed, they rejoined the column, and the march was resumed.

The early train from Berne catches the first boat on the Lake of Thun, and I landed at the second station on the lake, the village of Gonten or Gunten. M. Thury's list states that the glacière known as the Schafloch is on the Rothhorn, in the Canton of Berne, 4,500 mètres of horizontal distance from Merligen, a village on the shore of the lake; and from these data I was to find the cave. Gonten was apparently the nearest station to Merligen, and as soon as the small boat which meets the steamer had deposited me on the shore, I asked my way, first to the auberge, and then to Merligen. The auberge was soon found, and coffee and bread were at once ordered for breakfast; but when the people learned my eventual destination, they would not let me go to Merligen. A man, to whom--for no particular reason--I had given two-pence, called a council of the village upon me, and they proceeded to determine whether I must have a guide from Gonten, or only from a nameless chalet higher up. The discussion was noisy, and was conducted without words: they do not speak, those men of Gonten--they merely grunt, and each interprets the grunts as he wills. My two-penny friend told me what it all meant, in an obliging manner, but in words less intelligible than the grunts; and one member of the council drew out so elaborate a route--the very characters being wild patois--splitting the morning into quarter-stundes and half-quarter-stundes, with a sharp turn to the right or left at the end of each, that, as I drank my coffee, I determined to take a guide from the village, whatever the decision of the council might be. Fortunately, things took a right turn, and when breakfast was finished, a deputation went out and found a guide, suspiciously like one of their number who did not return, and I was informed that Christian Opliger would conduct me to the Schafloch for five francs, and a Trinkgeld if I were satisfied with him. In order to prove to me that he had really been at the cave, six days before, with two Bernese gentlemen, he seized my favourite low-crowned white hat, and endeavoured to knead it into the shape of the cave.

Our affairs took a long time to arrange, for grunts and pantomime are not rapid means of communication, when it comes to detail. The great question in Christian's mind seemed to be, what should we take with us to eat and drink? and when he propounded this to me with steady pertinacity, I, with equal pertinacity, had only one answer--a cord and a hatchet. At last he provided these, vowing that they were ridiculously unnecessary, but comprehending that they must be forthcoming, as a preliminary to anything more digestible; and then I told him, some dry bread and no wine. This drove him from grunts to words. No wine! it would be so frightfully hot on the mountains!--I told him I never drank wine when I was hot. But it would be so terribly cold in the cave!--I never drank wine when I was cold. But the climbing was sehr stark--we should need to give ourselves strength!--I never needed to give myself strength. There was no good water to be found the whole way!--I never drank water. Then, at last, after a brief grunt with the landlord, he struck:--he simply would not go without wine! I never wished him to do so, I explained; he might take as much as he chose, and I would pay for it, but he need not count me for anything in calculating how much was necessary. This made him perfectly happy; and when I answered his question touching cheese in a similar manner, only limiting him to a pound and a half, he rushed off for a large wicker hotte, spacious enough for the stowage of many layers of babies; and in it he packed all our properties, and all his provisions. The landlord had made his own calculations, and put it at 3lbs. of bread and 2lbs. of cheese; but I cut down the bread on account of its bulk, before I saw the size of the hotte, and Christian seemed to think he had quite enough to carry.

It was about half-past nine when we started from the auberge; and after a short mount in the full sun, we were not sorry to reach the pleasant shade of walnut trees which accompanied us for a considerable distance. The blue lake lay at our feet on the right, and beyond it the Niesen stood, with wonted grandeur, guarding its subject valleys; more in front, as we ascended transversely, the well-known snow-peaks of the Bernese Oberland glittered high above the nearer foreground, and, sheer above us, on the left, rose the ragged precipices whose flank we were to turn. The Rothhorn of the Canton Berne lies inland from the Lake of Thun, and sends down towards the lake a ridge sufficiently lofty, terminating in the Ralligst?cke, or Ralligflue, the needle-like point, so prettily ridged with firs, which advances its precipitous sides to the water. These precipices were formed in historic times, and the sheer face from which half a mountain has been torn stands now as clear and fresh as ever, while a chaos of vast blocks at its foot gives a point to the local legends of devastation and ruin caused by the various berg-falls. Two such falls are clearly marked by the débris: one of these, a hundred and fifty years ago, reduced the town of Ralligen to a solitary Schloss; and the other, in 1856, overwhelmed the village of Merligen, and converted its rich pastures into a desert cropped with stones. A traveller in Switzerland, at the beginning of this century, found that the inhabitants of Merligen were considered in the neighbourhood to be d'une stupidité et d'une bêtise extrêmes, and I am inclined to believe that after the last avalanche a general migration to Gonten must have taken place.

Christian's patois was of so hopeless a description, that I was tempted to give it up in despair, and walk on in silence. Still, as we were together for a whole long day, for better or for worse, it seemed worth while to make every effort to understand each other, else I could learn no local tales and legends, and Christian would earn but little Trinkgeld; so we struggled manfully against our difficulties. A confident American lady, meditating Europe, and knowing little French and no German, is said to have remarked jauntily that if the worst came to the worst she could always talk on her fingers to the peasants; but I did not attempt to avail myself of the results of early practice in that universal language. Christian's answers--the more intelligible parts of them--were a stratified succession of yes and no, and as he was a man naturally polite and acquiescent, the assentient strata were of more frequent occurrence; but of course, beyond showing his good-will, such answers were of no practical value. At length, after long perseverance, we were rewarded by the appearance of a curiosity which eventually gave each the key to the other's cipher. This was a strong stream of water, flowing out of the trunk of a growing tree, at a height of six feet or so from the ground; and I was so evidently interested in the phenomenon, that Christian exerted himself to the utmost, at last with success, to explain the construction of the fountain. A healthy poplar, seven or eight years old, is taken from its native soil, and a cold iron borer is run up the heart of the trunk from the roots, for six feet or more, by which means the pith is removed, and the trunk is made to assume the character of a pipe. A hole is then bored through from the outside of the trunk, to communicate with the highest point reached by the former operation, and in this second hole a spout is fixed. The same is done at a very short distance above the root, in the part of the trunk which will be buried in the earth when the tree is replanted, and the poplar is then fixed in damp ground, with the pipe at its root in connection with one of the little runs of water which abound in meadows at the foot of hills. A well-known property of fluids produces then the strange effect of an unceasing flow of water from an iron spout in the trunk of a living tree; and, as poplars love water, the fountain-tree thrives, and is more vigorous than its neighbours. This sort of fountain may be common in some parts of Switzerland, but I have not seen them myself except in this immediate neighbourhood. There is said to be one near Stachelberg.

In the endeavour to explain all this to me, Christian succeeded so perfectly, that for the rest of the day we understood each other very well. When I told him that he spoke much better German than the rest of the people in Gonten, he informed me that he had worked among foreigners, in proof whereof he held out his fingers; but all that I could gather from the invited inspection was, that, whatever his employment might have been, he could not be said to have come out of it with clean hands. He had been employed, he explained, in German dye-works, and there had learned something better than the native patois. About this time, too, I was able to make him understand that, as he carried more than I, he must call a halt whenever he felt so inclined; upon which he patted me affectionately on the back, and, if I could remember the word he used, I believe that I should now know the Swiss-German for a brick.

Our object was to pass along the side of the lake, at a considerable elevation, till we reached the east side of the Rothhorn range, when we were to turn up the Jüstisthal, and mount towards the highest point of the ridge, the glacière lying about an hour below the summit, in the face of the steep rock. The cliffs became very grand on either side, as soon as we entered this valley, the Jüstisthal, especially the precipices of the Beatenberg on the right; and our path lay through woods which have sprung up on the site of an early Berg-lauine. The guide-books call attention to a cavern with a curious intermittent spring in this neighbourhood. English tourists should feel some interest in the Cave of S. Beatus, inasmuch as its canonised occupant went from our shores to preach the Gospel to the wild men of the district, and died in this cave at a very advanced age. His relics remaining there, his fête-day attracted such crowds of pilgrims, that reforming Berne sent two deputies in 1528 to carry off the saint's skull, and bury it between the lakes; but still the pilgrimages continued, and at length the Protestant zeal of Berne went to the expense of a wall, and they built the pilgrims out in 1566. S. Beatus is said to have been converted by S. Barnabas in Britain, and to have gone to Rome, whence S. Peter sent him out to preach. His relics were conveyed to Lucerne in 1554, because heresy prevailed in the country where his cave lies, and an arm is among the proud possessions of pilgrim-pressed Einsiedeln. The saint was originally a British noble, by name Suetonius; and Dempster drops a letter from his name, and with much ingenuity makes him collateral ancestor of a Scottish family--'The Setons, tall and proud.'[56]

When we arrived at the last chalet, Christian turned to mount the grass slope on our left hand, which led to the part of the rocks in which the entrance to the Schafloch was to be sought. I never climbed up grass so steep, and before we had gone very far we were hailed by a succession of grunts, which my companion interpreted into assurances from some invisible person that we were going wrong. The man soon appeared, in the shape of a charcoal-burner, and told us that we were making the ascent much more difficult than it need be made, and also, that we should come to some awkward rock-climbing by the route we had chosen. It was too late, however, to turn back; so we persevered.

Before long, I heard a Meinherr! from Christian, in a tone which I knew meant rest and some food. He explained that he would rather take two small refreshments, one here and one at the Schafloch, than one large refreshment at the cave; so we propped ourselves on the grass, and tapped the hotte. The cheese proved to be delightful--six years old, the landlady told us afterwards, and apparently as hard as a bone, but when once mastered its flavour was admirable. Christian persuaded me to taste the wine, of which he had a high opinion, and he was electrified by the universal shudder the one taste caused. The grapes from which it was brewed had been grown in a gooseberry garden, and all the saccharine matter carefully extracted; the wine had been left without a cork since the first dawn of its existence, and the heat and jolting of its travels on Christian's back had reduced it to the condition of warm flat vinegar. He drank it with the utmost relish, and was evidently reconciled to my verdict by the consideration that there would be all the more for him.

From the appearance of the bread and cheese when the meal had come to an end, I concluded that my companion had changed his mind in the course of feeding, and had resolved to compress the whole eating of the day into one large refreshment here. The consumptive powers of the Swiss-German peasant, when his meal is franked, has not unfrequently reminded me of the miraculous eating performed by a yellow domino of that nation, at the fête by which Louis XIV. celebrated the second marriage of the Dauphin. This domino was of large size, and ate and drank voraciously throughout the entertainment, which lasted many hours, retiring every five minutes or so, and returning speedily with unabated appetite. The thing became at length so portentous, that enquiries were instituted, and it was found that the trusty Cent-Suisses had joined at a domino, and were drawing lots all through the evening for the next turn at eating; so that each man's time was necessarily limited, and he accordingly made the most of it.

We soon took to the rocks, and found them, as the charcoal-burner had promised, sufficiently stiff work. Colonel (now General) Dufour visited the Schafloch with a party of officers in 1822, and he describes[57] the path as a dangerous one, so much so that several of the gallant members of his party could not reach the cave: he uses rather large words about the precipices, and it is a matter of observation that military service on the Continent tends to induce a habit of body which is not the most suitable for doubtful climbing. The mountain seemed to be composed, in this part, of horizontal layers of crumbling shale, with a layer now and then of stone, about the thickness of an ordinary house-tile. The stone layers project from the looser masonry, and afford an excellent foot-hold; but a slip might be unpleasant. Every one who has done even a small amount of climbing has met with an abundance of places where 'a slip would be certain death,' as people are so fond of saying; but equally he has discovered that a slip is the last thing he thinks of making in such situations. Christian had told me that if I had the slightest tendency to Schwindelkopf, I must not go by the improvised route; but it proved that there were really no precipices at all, much less any of sufficient magnitude to turn an ordinary head dizzy. He chose these rocks as the text for a long sermon on the necessity for great caution when we should arrive at the cave, telling of an Englishman who had tried to visit it two years before, and had cut his knee so badly with his guide's axe that he had to be carried down the mountain to Gonten, and thence to the steamer for Thun, in which town he lay for many weeks in the hands of the German doctor; this last assertion being by no means incredible. Also, of a native who attempted the cave alone, and, making one false step near the top of a fall of ice, slipped down and down almost for ever, and finally landed with broken limbs on a floor of ice, where he was found, two days after, frozen stiff, but still alive.

It was not necessary to mount much, for we were almost as high as the mouth of the cave, according to Christian's belief, and our work consisted chiefly in passing along the face of the rock, round projecting buttresses and re-entering angles, till we reached that part of the mountain where we might expect to find our glacière. While we were thus engaged, two hoarse and ominous ravens took us under their charge, and accompanied us with unpleasant screams, which argued the proximity of food or nest. We soon found that we had disturbed their meal, for we came to marks of blood, and saw that some animal had slipped on the rocks above, and landed on the ledge on which we were walking, bounding off again on to a shelf below, where the ravens had already torn the body to pieces. I must confess to a very considerable shudder when we discovered the reason of their screams, and neither of us seemed to enjoy the circling and croaking of the unclean birds.

Very soon after this, Christian announced that we had reached the cave, and a steep little climb of six feet or so brought us to the entrance. Here we were haunted still by the presence of pieces of the fallen goat, which lay about here and there on the ground; and the flutter of wings overhead explained to us that the old ravens had built their nest in the mouth of the cave, and had brought morsels of raw flesh to their young ones, which were scarcely able to fly. I am ashamed to say that we were so angry with the old birds for shrieking so suggestively in our ears, and parading before us the results of a slip on the rocks, that we charged ourselves with stones, and put an end to the most noisy member of the foul brood; Christian making some of the worst shots it is possible to conceive, and raining blocks of stone and lumps of wood in all directions, with such reckless impartiality, that the only safe place seemed to be between him and the bird. One of us, at least, regretted the useless cruelty as soon as it was perpetrated, and it came back upon me very reproachfully at an awkward part of our return journey.

The Schafloch does not take its name from the bones contained in it, as is the case with the Kühloch in Franconia,[58] but from the fact that when a sudden storm comes on, the sheep and goats make their way to the cave for shelter, never, I was told, going so far as the commencement of the ice. The entrance faces ESE., and is of large size, with a low wall built partly across it to increase the shelter for the sheep: Dufour calls the entrance 50 feet wide and 25 feet high, but I found the width at the narrowest part, a few yards within the entrance, to be 33 feet.[59] For a short distance the cave passes horizontally into the rock, in a westerly direction, and is quite light; it then turns sharp to the south, the floor beginning to fall, and candles becoming necessary. Here the height increases considerably, and the way lies over a wild confusion of loose masses of rock, which have apparently fallen from the roof, and make progression very difficult. We soon reached a point where ice began to appear among the stones; and as we advanced it became more and more prominent, till at length we lost sight of the rock, and stood on solid ice.

On either side of the cave was a grand column of ice forming the portal, as it were, through which we must pass to further beauties. The ice-floor rose to meet these columns in a graceful swelling curve, perfectly continuous, so that the general effect was that of two columns whose roots expanded and met in the middle of the cave; and, indeed, that may have been really the order of formation. The right-hand column was larger than its fellow, but, owing to the more gradual expansion of the lower part of its height, and the steepness of the consequent slope, we were unable to measure its girth at any point where it could be fairly called a column. Christian had been in the cave a few days before, and he assured me that the swelling base of this column had increased very considerably since his last visit, pointing out a solid surface of ice, at one part of our track, where he had before walked on bare rock. The cave was by no means extremely cold, that is to say, it was rather above than below the freezing point, and the splashing of drops of water was audible on all sides; so that, if Christian spoke the truth,--it was sad to be so often reminded of Legree's plaintive soliloquy in the opening pages of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,'--the explanation, I suppose, might be that the drops of water, falling on the top of the column or stalagmite, run down the sides, and carry with them some melted portion from the upper part of the column, and after a course of a few yards become so far refrigerated as to form ice.[60] The pillar on the left was more approachable, but we were unable to determine its dimensions; for on the outer side, where it stood a few feet or yards clear of the side of the cave, the rounded ice at its foot fell off at once into a dark chasm, a sort of smooth enticing Bergschrund, which we did not care to face. Christian declared that this column was not so high as it was a day or two before, which may go to support the theory expressed above, or at least that part of it which depends upon the supposition of water dropping on to the head of the column, and melting certain portions of it.

If we were unable to take the external dimensions of this column, I had no doubt that we should find internal investigations interesting; so, to Christian's surprise, I began to chop a hole in it, about two feet from the ground, and, having made an entrance sufficiently large, proceeded to get into the cavity which presented itself. The flooring of the dome-shaped grotto in which I found myself, was loose rock, at a level about two feet below the surface of the ice-floor on which Christian still stood. The dome itself was not high enough to allow me to stand upright, and from the roof, principally from the central part, a complex mass of delicate icicles passed down to the floor, leaving a narrow burrowing passage round, which was itself invaded by icicles from the lower part of the sloping roof, and by stubborn stalagmites of ice rising from the floor.[61] The details of this central cluster of icicles, and in fact of every portion of the interior of the strange grotto, were exceedingly lovely, and I crushed with much regret, on hands and knees, through fair crystal forests and frozen dreams of beauty. In making the tour of this grotto, contorting my body like a snake to get in and out among the ice-pillars, and do as little damage as might be, but yet, with all my care, accompanied by the incessant shiver and clatter of breaking and falling ice, I came to a hole in the ground, too dark and deep for one candle to show its depth; so I called to Christian to come in, thinking that two candles might show it better. He asked if I really meant it, and assured me he could be of no use; but I told him that he must come, and informed him that he, being the smaller man, would find the passage quite easy. It was very fortunate that I had not waited a minute longer before summoning him, for just as he had dropped into the hollow, and was beginning his journey to the side where I now was, a drop of water and a simultaneous icicle came upon my candle, and left me in darkness, curled up like a dormouse in a nest of ice, at the edge of the newly discovered shaft; while my troubles were brought to a climax by an incursion of icy drops, which had me at their mercy. If all this had happened while Christian was still outside, he would probably have staid there wringing his hands till it was time to go home, and I should certainly not have liked to move without a light. As it was, I did not inform him of the catastrophe, but let him come toiling on, wondering audibly what madness could drive Herrschaft into such places; and when he arrived, we cut off the wet wick, and lighted the candle again. We could make nothing of the hole, so he returned by the way he had come, and I completed the tour of the grotto, finding the same difficult passage, and the same ice beauties, all the way round.

Having squeezed ourselves out again through the narrow hole, we now passed between the two gigantic columns, and found that the sea of ice became still broader and bolder. I much regret that I neglected to take any measurements in this part of the cave; but farther down, where it was certainly not so broad, I found the width of the ice to be 75 feet. It was throughout of the crystalline character which prevails in all the large masses in the glacières I have visited. For some distance beyond the columns, we found neither stalactites nor stalagmites--indeed, I forgot to look at the roof--until we came to the edge of a glorious ice-fall, down which Christian said it was impossible to go--no one had ever been farther than where we now stood. I have seen no subterranean ice-fall so grand as this, round and smooth, and perfectly unbroken, passing down, like the rapids of some river too deep for its surface to be disturbed, into darkness against which two candles prevailed nothing. The fall in the Upper Glacière of the Pré de S. Livres was strange enough, but it was very small, and led to a confined corner of the cavern; whereas this of the Schafloch rolls down majestically, cold and grey, into a dark gulf of which we could see neither the roof nor the end, while the pieces of ice which we despatched down the steep slope could be heard going on and on, as M. Soret says, à une très-grande distance. The shape, also, of the fall was very striking. Beginning at the left wall of the cave, the edge ran out obliquely towards the middle, when it suddenly turned and struck straight across to the right-hand wall, so that we were able to stand on a tongue, as it were, in the middle of the top of the fall. To add to the effect, precisely from this tongue or angle a fine column of ice sprang out of the very crest of the fall, rising to or towards the roof, and to this we clung to peer down into the darkness.

The rope we had brought was not long, and the idea was hopeless of cutting steps down this great fall, leading we knew not where, with an incline which it frightened Christian even to look at. I began to consider, however, whether it was not possible to make our way down the left branch of the ice, which fell rather towards the side wall than into the dark gulf below. On examining more closely, I found that a large stone, or piece of rock, projected from the face of this branch of the fall, about 12 feet from the top, and to this I determined to descend, as a preliminary to further attempts, the candles not showing us what there was beyond. Accordingly, I tied on the rope, and planted Christian where he had a safe footing, telling him to hold tight if I slipped, for he seemed to have little idea what the rope was meant for. The ice was very hard, and cutting steps downwards with a short axe is not easy work; so when I came within 3 or 4 feet of the rock, I forgot the rope, and set off for a short glissade. Christian, of course, thought something was wrong, and very properly put a prompt strain upon the rope, which reduced his Herr to a spread-eagle sort of condition, in which it was difficult to explain matters, so as to procure a release. When that was accomplished, I saw it would be easy to reach the point where the ice met the wall, so I called to Christian to come down, which he did in an unpremeditated, avalanche fashion; and then, by cutting steps here and there, and making use of odd points of rock, we skirted down the edge of the great fall, and reached at last the lower regions.

When I came to read Dufour's account of his visit in 1822, I found that the ice must have increased very much since his time. He uses sufficiently large words, speaking of the vaste, horrible et pourtant magnifique--of the horreur du séjour, and the grandeur des demeures souterraines; but he only calls the glorious ice-fall a plan incliné, and says that the whole was less remarkable for the amount of ice, than for the characteristics indicated by the words I have quoted. He says that it required une assez forte dose de courage to slip down to the stone of which I have spoken; the fact being that at the time of my visit it would have been impossible to do so with any chance of stopping oneself, for the flat surface of the stone was all but even with the ice. M. Soret, who saw the cave in 1860, determined that cords were then absolutely necessary for the descent, which he did not attempt; and the only Englishman I have met who has seen this cave, tells me that he and his party went no farther than the edge of the fall.[62] Probably each 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 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. The string was always catching at something, and mere progression, without any string to manage, would have been difficult enough under the circumstances. It was completely dark, so a candle occupied one hand, and, as every step must be cut, save where an opportune rock or stone appeared, an axe occupied the other; then there was the string to be attended to, and both hands must be ready to clutch at some projecting point when a slip came, and now and then a ruder rock required circumvention. Add to all this, that hands and feet had not been rendered more serviceable by an hour and a half of contact with ice, and it will easily be understood that I was glad when the measurement was over. At this point the breadth was 25 yards, and, a few feet above the line in which I crossed, all traces of rock or stone disappeared, and there was nothing but unbroken ice. I had of course abundant opportunities for examining the structure of the ice, and I found in all parts of the fall the same large-grained material, breaking up, when cut, into the usual prismatic nuts.

I now rejoined Christian, and we worked our way upwards to the mouth of the cave, penitently desisting from stoning a remaining raven. We observed at the very mouth, by watching the flame of the candles, a slight current outwards, extremely feeble, and on our first arrival I had fancied there was a current, equally slight, inwards, but neither was perceptible beyond the entrance of the cave. M. Soret was fortunate enough to witness a curious phenomenon, at the time of his visit to the Schafloch, in September 1860, which throws some light upon the atmospheric state of the cave. The day was externally very foggy, and the fog had penetrated into the cavern; but as soon as M. Soret began to descend to the glacière itself, properly so called, he passed down out of the fog, and found the air for the rest of the way perfectly clear.[63]

M. Soret states that he has not absolute confidence in his thermometrical observations, but as he had more time than I to devote to such details, inasmuch as he did not pass down into the lowest part of the cave, I give his results rather than my own, which were carelessly made on this occasion:--On a stone near the first column of ice, 0°·37 C.; on a stick propped against the column on the edge of the great ice-fall, 2°·37 C.; in a hole in the ice, filled with water by drops from the roof, 0° C. approximately.[64] The second result is sufficiently remarkable. My own observations would give nearer 33° F. than 32° as the general temperature of the cave.

Christian was so cold when we had finished our investigations, that he determined to take his second refreshment en route, and, moreover, time was getting rather short. We had started from Gonten at half-past nine in the morning, and reached the glacière about half-past twelve. It was now three o'clock, and the boat from Gonten must reach the steamer at half-past six precisely, so there was not too much time for us; especially as we were to return by a more mountainous route, which involved further climbing towards the summit of the Rothhorn, and was to include a visit to the top of the Ralligflue. On emerging from the cave, we were much struck by the beauty of the view, the upper half of the Jungfrau, with its glittering attendants and rivals, soaring above a rich and varied foreground not unworthy of so glorious a termination. There was not time, however, to admire it as it deserved, and we set off almost at once up the rocks, soon reaching a more elevated table-land by dint of steep climbing. The ground of this table-land was solid rock, smoothed and rounded by long weathering, and fissured in every direction by broad and narrow crevasses 2 or 3 feet deep, at the bottom of which was luxuriant botany, in the shape of ferns, and mallows, and monkshood, and all manner of herbs. The learned in such matters call these rock-fallows Karrenfelden. When we had crossed this plateau, and came to grass, we found a gorgeous carpet of the huge couched blue gentian (G. acaulis, Fr. Gentiane sans tige), with smaller patterns put in by the dazzling blue of the delicate little flower of the same species (G. verna ); while the white blossoms of the grass of Parnassus, and the frailer white of the dryade à huit petales, and the modest waxen flowers of the Azalea procumbens and the airelle ponctuée (Vaccineum vitis idaea), tempered and set off the prevailing blue. There were groves, too, rather lower down, of Alpine roses (the first I had come across that year), not the fringed or the green-backed species which botanists love best, but the honest old rust-backed rhododendron, which every Swiss traveller has been pestered with in places where the children are one short step above mere mendicity, but, equally, which every Swiss traveller hails with Medean delight when he comes upon it on the mountain-side. We were now, too, in the neighbourhood of the first created Alpen rose. The story is, that a young peasant, who had climbed the precipices behind Oberhausen for rock-flowrets, as the price of some maiden's love, fell at the moment when he had secured the flowers, and was killed. From his blood the true Alpen rose sprang, and took its colour.

We were now passing along the summit of one of the lower spurs of the Rothhorn range, and making for the peak of the Ralligflue, which lay considerably below us. In descending near the line of crest, we found a large number of very deep fissures, narrow and black, some of them extending to a great distance across the face of the hill; sometimes they appeared as mere holes, down which we despatched stones, sometimes as unpleasant crevasses almost hidden by flowers and the shrubs of rhododendron. In many of these we dimly discovered accumulated snow at the bottom, and we observed that the Alpine roses which overhung the snow-holes were by far the deepest coloured and most beautiful we could find.

To reach the Ralligflue, we had to cross a smooth green lawn completely covered with the sweet vanilla orchis (O. nigra), which perfumed the air almost too powerfully. No one can ever fully appreciate the grandeur of the lion-like Niesen till he has seen it from this verdant little paradise, on the slope near the Bergli Chalet, with a diminutive limpid lake in the meadow at his feet, and the blue lake of Thun below. The Kanderthal and the Simmenthal lie exposed from their entrance at the foot of the Niesen; and when the winding Kanderthal is lost, the Adelbodenthal takes up the telescope, and guides the eye to the parent glaciers. This view I was fortunately able to enjoy rather longer than that from the mouth of the Schafloch; for we had made such rapid way, that Christian found there was time for a meal of milk in the chalet, and meanwhile left me lying in perfect luxury on the sweet grass.

From the Ralligflue a long and remarkably steep zigzag leads to the lower ground, and down this Christian ran at full speed, jodeling in a most trying manner; indeed, at one of the sudden turns of the path he went off triumphantly into a falsetto so unearthly, that he lost his legs, and landed in a promiscuous sort of way on a lower part of the zigzag, after which he was slower and less vocal.

We eventually reached Gonten so soon, that there was time to cool and have a bath in the lake; and when that was nearly finished, Christian brought a plate of cherries and a detachment of the village, and I ate the cherries and held a levée in the boat--very literally a levée, as the dressing was by no means accomplished when the deputation arrived. My late guide, now, as he said, a friend for life, made a speech to the people, setting forth that he had done that day what he had never thought to do; for, often as he had been to the entrance of the Schafloch--five or six times at the least--he had never before reached the end of the cave. And to whom, he asked, did he owe it? All previous Herrschaft under his charge had cried Immer zurück! but this present Herr had known but one cry, Immer vorw?rts! Luckily the steamer now approached, so the speech came to an end, and he shook hands affectionately, with a vigour that would certainly have transmitted some of the dye, if that material had not become a part of the skin which it coloured. Then the village also shook hands, having evidently understood what Christian said, notwithstanding the fact that it was intelligible German, and I returned to Thun and Berne.

No. 53 was still the only bed disengaged, for it was very late when I reached Berne; but on my vehement protestations against that unquiet chamber, the landlord most obligingly converted a sofa in his own sitting-room into a temporary bed, and made it over to me. This room was separated by a door of ground-glass from another sitting-room brilliantly lighted, in which a number of German young gentlemen were fêting the return of a comrade after the national manner. The landlord said he thought it must soon be over, for he doubted whether they could last much longer; but their powers of endurance were greater than he had supposed. It will readily be imagined that German songs with a good chorus, the solo parts being very short, and received with the utmost impatience by the chorus, were even less soporific in their effect than the flirtations--though boisterous beyond all conventional propriety--of German housemaids and waiters.[65]

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