After descending about eighty steps of the staircase, bits of ice
appeared on the walls and floor and after some thirty steps more, a
lateral gallery opened to the right, and into this we turned. This may
be called the upper cave or story, for in Démenyfálva--besides the
entrance chamber--there are practically two stories, the upper one of
which is mainly ornamented with stalactites, the lower one with ice.
There was a little ice on the floor from which rose some small ice
columns, perhaps fifty centimeters in height. The cave or gallery had
a gentle downward slope and turned towards the left. After some little
distance, we came to another wooden staircase, of ten or twelve steps,
quite coated over with thick, solid ice. Misura had to cut away at it
for several minutes, before he could clear the steps enough to descend.
This was in fact the beginning of an ice wall, the _Eiswand_ or
_Eismauer_, which, turning to the right, flowed through a rock arch to
the lowest cave. The rock arch or portal was some three meters wide and
two meters high, and a fringe of beautiful organ-pipe like icicles hung
on it on the right hand. Just beyond the portal the ice sloped steeply
for a couple of meters; then it became level and on it rose a little
pyramid, a meter and a half in height perhaps, and a column; then the
ice sloped away again to the lower cave.
[Illustration: IN THE REAR OF THE SCHAFLOCH.]
[Illustration: Fig. 4. Vertical Section of Démenyfálva.]
We then continued our course beyond the rock portal along the upper
cavern for about two hundred meters. It was a fine large gallery or
passage and during the first fifty meters or so, we found numerous
small ice cones, perhaps a hundred of them, from tiny little ones to
some about forty centimeters in height. Many of these were columnar in
form, nearly as large at the top as at the base: in some cases the top
was flat, and the columns then looked almost as if an upper portion
were sawn off. I have seen this shape of column nowhere else. In places
there were slabs and bits of ice on the floor. The last hundred meters
of this upper cave was free from ice and was exceptionally dry. It was
formed of a pale yellow limestone rock, almost dolomitic in color, and
many stalactites, in their thousand various shapes, hung from the roof
and on the sides. In one spot, one big limestone stalagmite towered up
directly in the middle of the gallery. We did not go to the end of the
cave, where ice has never been found.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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