The hut stood in the centre of a little hollow, on the brink of a torrent, and was girt about by a rim of hills. There was, indeed, but one outlet, and that a precipitous gully, through which the water rushed with a great roaring noise, and I gathered from this that it fell pretty sheer. I was the more inclined to this conjecture, since had the gully afforded a path it would have been the natural entrance into the hollow, and I knew that I had not been brought that way, else I must needs have remarked the roar of the stream sooner than I did. For that sound only came to my ears when I was but a short distance from the hut. If you stood with your back to the door of the hut, the noise came from directly behind you. On your right rose the pine-forest wherein we laboured, very steep and dense, to the crest of a hill; on your left a barren wilderness, encumbered by stones, sloped up to the foot of a great field of snow, which grew steeper and steeper towards its summit. Here and there great masses of ice bulged out from the incline, like nothing so much as the bosses of shields. I was rather apt to underrate the size and danger of these, until one day a fragment, which seemed in comparison no greater than a pea, broke away from one of these bosses and dropped on to the slope beneath, starting, as it were, a little rillet of snow down the hillside. On the instant the hollow was filled with a great thunder, as though a battery of cannon had been discharged; and I should hardly have believed this fragment could have produced so great a disturbance, had not the Tyrolese looked across the valley, and by their words to one another assured me it was so. In front of you, the head of this hollow was blocked up by a tongue of ice, which wound downwards like some huge dragon, and the stream of which I have spoken flowed from the tip of it, as though the dragon spewed the water from its mouth. It was then apparent to me from these observations that I had been carried into this prison by some track through the pine-forest, and I set myself to the discovery of it. But whether the wood-cutters kept aloof from it, or whether it was in reality indistinguishable, I could perceive no trace of it. At one point on the crest of the hill there was a marked depression, and I judged that there lay the true entrance; but through the gap I could see nothing but a sea of white, with dark peaks of rock tossed this way and that, and dreaded much adventuring myself that way.