We afterwards found an easier entrance to the
cave; but the floor was so wet, and the constant drops of water from the
roof so little agreeable, that we got out again as soon as possible,
especially as this was not the glaciere we had come to see.
When we reached the surface once more, the landlord and the domestic
both assured us that the _neigiere_ was the great sight, the glaciere
being nothing at all, but, such as it was, they would lead us to it.
They took us to the fissured rock mentioned above; and when we looked
down into the fissures, we saw that some of them were filled at the
bottom with ice. They were not the ordinary fissures, like the crevasses
of a glacier, but rather disconnected slits in the surface, opening into
larger chambers in the heart of the rock, where the ice lay. In one part
of this curious district the surface sank considerably, and showed
nothing but a tumbled collection of large stones and rocks, piled in a
most disorderly manner. By examining the neighbourhood of the larger of
these rocks, we found a burrow, down which one of the men and I made our
way, and thus, after some windings in the interior, reached a point from
which we could descend to the ice.
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