He says
that it required _une assez forte dose de courage_ to slip down to the
stone of which I have spoken; the fact being that at the time of my
visit it would have been impossible to do so with any chance of stopping
oneself, for the flat surface of the stone was all but even with the
ice. M. Soret, who saw the cave in 1860, determined that cords were then
absolutely necessary for the descent, which he did not attempt; and the
only Englishman I have met who has seen this cave, tells me that he and
his party went no farther than the edge of the fall.[62] Probably each
year's accumulation on the upper floor of ice has added to the height
and rapidity of the fall; but at any rate, when Dufour was there, _des
militaires_--as he dashingly tells--were not to be stopped, and he and
his party--such of them as had not been already stopped by the
precipices outside--let themselves slip down to the stone, and thence
descended as we did.
We soon found that the larger ice-fall looked extremely grand when seen
from below, and that in a modified form it reached far down into the
lower cave, and terminated in a level sea of ice; but, before making any
further investigations into its size, we pressed on to look for the end
of the cave.
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