United States or Guam ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We carried a large piece of ice down to Arzier in a botanical tin, and on our arrival there we found that all traces of external lines had disappeared. This visit to the glacière was on Saturday, and on the following Monday I determined to go up alone, to take a registering thermometer, and leave it in the cave for the night; which, of course, would entail a third visit on the next day.
But from Arzier there is a short cut of less than two hours along the side of the hills, leaving that village by a deep gorge not unfitly named L'Enfer, and a dark wood which retains an odour of more savage bygone times in its name of the 'Bear's Wood, as containing a cavern where an old bear was detected in the act of attempting to winter.
From Arzier to the Châlet of La Genollière, would be about two hours, for a man walking and mounting quickly, and never losing the way; and the glacière lies a few minutes farther to the north-west, at an elevation of about 2,800 feet above the lake, or 4,000 feet above the sea.
In the summer of 1861, I found myself, with some members of my family, in a small rustic pension in the village of Arzier, one of the highest villages of the pleasant slope by which the Jura passes down to the Lake of Geneva.
From Arzier, however, which is nine miles up from Nyon, it was not necessary to take the S. Cergues route; and we went straight through the woods, past the site of an old convent and its drained fish-pond, and up the various rocky ridges of hill, with no guide beyond the recollection of the previous visits two and three years before, and a sort of idea that we must go north-west.
The thermometer was well above the surface of the ice, and was protected from chance drops of water from the roof. The next morning I started early from Arzier, having an afternoon journey in prospect to the neighbourhood of another glacière, and was accompanied by Captain Douglas Smith, of the 4th Regiment.
The cave itself lies at no great distance from Arzier a village which may be seen in profile from the Grand Quai of Geneva, ambitiously climbing towards the summit of the last slope of the Jura.
At the bottom, after penetrating a few yards into a chasm in the rock, we discovered a small low cave, perfectly dark, with a flooring of ice, and a pillar of the same material in the form of a headless woman, one of whose shoulders we eventually carried off, to regale our parched friends at Arzier.
One of these holes is open, and as the guide and I for my sisters remained at Arzier stood on the neck of ground between the holes, we could see the snow lying at the bottom of the cave; the other is covered with trunks of trees, laid over the mouth to prevent the rays of the sun from striking down on to the ice.
Word Of The Day