Agassiz had been lowered by a rope. When his feet suddenly plunged into the icy stream his shout for help was misunderstood by his friends and he was lowered still further. His second cry, which you may be sure promptly followed the first, showed that something had gone wrong and he was drawn out. The worst of it was that coming up he had to steer his course among those huge icicles, any one of which, being worn away or broken loose by the friction of the rope and striking his head, would probably have killed him. But they are always doing things like that--these men of science. They keep on being as curious and enthusiastic about the things they are interested in as any boy. [Illustration: THOSE LITTLE CURVED LINES WHEN YOU GET UP CLOSE This is what those little curved lines are--really; great yawning chasms in the ice. The sun is shining from the left; a morning sun, probably, as those tourists are out for a walk. This scene must be pretty well down the glacier's course, far from the upper fields, for you see these people are just in ordinary dress--not in the dress of mountain-climbers, with ropes and Alpine stocks and everything. ] It is perfectly safe to climb glaciers as we are doing--in a book--but they are really ticklish things to go about on, as well as down into. To find out all the interesting things you can so easily get through pictures and the printed page took years of skillful study, ingenuity, and endless patience and much courage. What a little further on in this chapter you will learn about the movements of glaciers in seven minutes, it took Agassiz seven long years to find out and make sure of. To Agassiz more than to any other one man the world owes the tremendous idea of the Ice Age and its story. His home among the glaciers of these Alps--named playfully by the devoted scholars who worked with him the "Hôtel des Neuchatelois"--was a rude shelter under a projecting rock. The results of this long study he published in a work in two volumes, and so made known the great facts he had found and the theory about an Ice Age which he based upon them and which is now everywhere accepted. He became professor of geology at Harvard University and as famous a teacher as he was a student of nature. After his great and useful life was ended he was buried in his adopted land with a boulder from the site of the little stone hut on the glacier for his monument. III. The Soul of the Glacier