In crossing the last grass, we found the earliest vanilla orchis (_Orchis nigra_) of the year, and came upon beds of moonwort (_Botrychium Lunaria_) of so unusual a size that our progress ceased till such time as the finest specimens were secured.
Some time before reaching this point, we caught a glimpse of a dark speck on the highest summit in sight, which recalled pleasantly a night we had spent there three years before for the purpose of seeing the sun rise.[3] My sisters had revisited the Chalet des Chevres, which this dark speck represented, in 1862, and found that the small chamber in which we had slept on planks and logs had become a more total ruin than before, in the course of the winter, so that it is now utterly untenable.
From Arzier to the Chalet of La Genolliere, would be about two hours, for a man walking and mounting quickly, and never losing the way; and the glaciere 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.[4] A rough mountain road, leading over an undulating expanse of grass, passes narrowly between two small clumps of trees, each surrounded by a low circular wall, the longer diameter of the enclosure on the south side of the road being 60 feet.

In this enclosure is a natural pit, of which the north side is a sheer rock, of the ordinary limestone of the Jura, with a chasm almost from the top; while the south side is less steep, and affords the means of scrambling down to the bottom, where a cave is found at the foot of the chasm, passing under the road.

The floor of this small but comparatively lofty cave is 52 feet below the surface of the earth, and slopes away rapidly to the west, where, by the help of candles, the rock which forms the wall is seen to stop short of the floor, leaving an entrance 2 or 3 feet high to an inner cave--the glaciere.
The roof of this inner cave rises slightly, and its floor falls, so that there is a height of about 6 feet inside, excepting where a large open fissure in the roof passes high up towards the world above.

At one end, neither the roof nor the floor slopes much, and in this part of the cave the height is less than 3 feet.
It would be very imprudent to go straight into an ice-cave after a long walk on a hot summer's day, so we prepared to dine under the shade of the trees at the edge of the pit, and I went down into the cave for a few moments to get a piece of ice for our wine.

My first impression was that the glaciere was entirely destroyed, for the outer cave was a mere chaos of rock and stones; but, on further investigation, it turned out that the ruin had not reached the inner cave.