To prevent cattle from falling into the pit, a wall has been built round the trees in which it lies. The circumference of this wall is 435 feet, but there are so many trees at the upper end of the enclosure that this gives an exaggerated idea of the size of the pit. The men fed while the preliminary measurements were being made; and when this was accomplished, they pressed their bottle of wine upon me so hospitably that I was obliged to antedate the result which its appearance promised, and plead _mal d'estomac_. Of all things, it is most unwise to give a reason for a negative, and so it proved in this instance; for they promptly felicitated themselves and me on the good luck by which it happened that they had brought a wine famous on all the côte as a remedy for that somewhat vague complaint--a homoeopathic remedy in allopathic doses. The glacière is entered by a natural pit in the gentle slope of grass, not much unlike the pit of La Genollière, but wider, and covered at the bottom with snow.[19] The first ladder leads down to a ledge of rock on which bushes and trees grow, and this ledge it is possible to reach without a ladder; the next ladder leads on to the deep snow, and descent by any ordinary manner of climbing is in this case quite impossible.[20] The snow slopes down towards a lofty arch in the rock which forms the north-west side of the pit, and this arch is the entrance to the glacière; it is 28-3/4 feet wide, and as soon as we passed under it we found that the snow became ice, and it was necessary to cut steps; for the surface of underground ice is so slippery, unlike the surface of ordinary glaciers, that the slightest defect from the horizontal makes the use of the axe advisable. The stream of ice falls gradually, spreading out laterally like a fan, so as to accommodate itself to the shape of the cave, which it fills up to the side walls; it increases in breadth from 28-3/4 feet at the top to 72 feet at the bottom of the slope, and the distance from the top of the first ladder to this point is 177 feet. Here we were arrested by a strange wall of ice 22 feet high, down which there seemed at first no means of passing; but finding an old ladder frozen into a part of the wall, we chopped out holes between the upper steps, and so descended, landing on a flooring composed of broken blocks and columns of ice, with a certain amount of what seemed to be drifted snow. This wall of ice, which was 72 feet long and 22 feet high, was not vertical, but sloped the wrong way, caving in under the stream of ice; and from the projecting top of the wall a long fringe of vast icicles hung down, along the whole breadth of the fan. The effect of this was, that we could walk between the ice-wall and the icicles as in a cloister, with solid ice on the one hand and Gothic arcades of ice on the other, the floor being likewise of ice, and the roof formed by the junction of the wall with the top of the icicle-arcade. The floor of