In the floor of the little chamber there are two holes, and, stepping
over these, we stood at the rear end, about eighteen meters distant
from the beginning of the slope. My companion now set some birchbark
on fire and dropped it into the innermost hole, and we laid down in
turn, flat on the rock floor, and craned our necks through the hole.
Mr. Williams thought he could see ice below us. I looked down after
him and found that I was looking into a lower chamber whose sides were
invisible. The floor was some three meters below vertically, and on
this the birchbark was burning brightly. I think I saw some ice, but
I could not be sure, as there was too much smoke to see distinctly.
My companion offered to go down through the hole and get some ice; a
proposition I promptly vetoed, as had anything gone wrong, I could not
possibly have given him any assistance, as there was no extra rope.
Mr. Williams told me that he went down several times before in July or
August, and always found ice on the slanting floor. He said he did not
know how far this lower chamber extended, nor the length of the ice
floor. One thing which makes me hesitate to think that we saw ice was,
that the temperature of the chamber where we were was not at all icy;
but probably--I had forgotten my thermometer--nearly normal.
When we stood once more by the tree at the top of the slope, the mouth
of another cave was visible about two meters below us. Mr. Williams
said it had never looked more than a little crack before, and that the
opening was much bigger than at his last visit. It was directly under
the slope by which we descended and it vanished into darkness. Its
direction led straight towards the lower chamber, and it almost surely
leads to it. It seems thus that there are two hollows, one directly
above the other; and that the lower one is a glacière, while the upper
one is not. The cold air of winter would naturally sink into the lower
chamber, and the spring thaws would furnish plenty of drip, so that
this place seems to answer every requirement of a cave glacière.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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