Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland Part 6

CHAPTER VIII.

THE GLACIeRE AND NEIGIeRE 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 pa.s.sed, 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 Riviere 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 Comte. 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 glaciere was new to the world of Pontarlier; but the landlord of the Hotel 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 pa.s.ser-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 pa.s.sed 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 kilometres 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 gra.s.s. 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 glacieres, 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 glacieres, 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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sisted 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 a.s.sumed 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 glacieres 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 glacieres. Food we could have; but why _should_ we wish to go to the glacieres, 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 pa.s.ser-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 p.r.o.nounced 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 a.s.serted, as every one seemed in all cases to a.s.sert, 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 glacieres; 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 glaciere or glacieres--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 sylvatic.u.m_ 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 gra.s.s, we came upon large patches of a plant, with scented leaves and pungent seeds, which we had not known before, _Meum athamantic.u.m_, 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.

heteropyhlle,_ 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 pa.s.sed 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 _neigiere_, a word evidently formed on the same principle as _glaciere_. 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 glaciere we had come to see.

When we reached the surface once more, the landlord and the domestic both a.s.sured us that the _neigiere_ was the great sight, the glaciere 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 creva.s.ses 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 Glaciere of Monthezy; 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 glaciere 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 glaciere, 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 a.s.serted 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 metres 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 glaciere, or the source? The source, infinitely. _Then_ it was clear monsieur had not seen the glaciere:--he was sure before that monsieur had not, _now_ it was quite clear, for in all the world there was nothing like that glaciere. The Loue!--one might rather see the glaciere 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 kilometres 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--_a 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 54: _Cruel comme a Morat_ was long a popular saying.]

CHAPTER IX.

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 glaciere 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 glaciere 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 pa.s.sage, 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 pa.s.sage, 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 _cafe_ 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 pa.s.sed, 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 glaciere known as the Schafloch is on the Rothhorn, in the Canton of Berne, 4,500 metres of horizontal distance from Merligen, a village on the sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e, 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_, s.p.a.cious 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 Ralligstocke, 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 _debris_: 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 stupidite et d'une betise extremes_, 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 a.s.sentient 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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.s 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 Justisthal, and mount towards the highest point of the ridge, the glaciere 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 Justisthal, 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 sh.o.r.es 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 fete-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 n.o.ble, 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s so steep, and before we had gone very far we were hailed by a succession of grunts, which my companion interpreted into a.s.surances 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 gra.s.s, 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 fete 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 appet.i.te. The thing became at length so portentous, that enquiries were inst.i.tuted, 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 a.s.sertion 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 pa.s.sing along the face of the rock, round projecting b.u.t.tresses and re-entering angles, till we reached that part of the mountain where we might expect to find our glaciere. While we were thus engaged, two hoa.r.s.e 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 Kuhloch 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 pa.s.ses 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 ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sured 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, princ.i.p.ally from the central part, a complex ma.s.s of delicate icicles pa.s.sed down to the floor, leaving a narrow burrowing pa.s.sage 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage, and the same ice beauties, all the way round.