The path is tolerably steep, leading across the _petit Pre de Rolle_, and through woods of beech and fir, till the summit of one of the minor ridges of the Jura is reached, whence a short descent leads to the mouth of the glaciere, something more than 4,000 feet above the sea.

The ground here slopes down towards the north; and on the slope, among fir-trees, an irregular circular basin is seen, some seven or eight yards across,[13] and perhaps two yards deep, at the bottom of which are two holes.

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.

This protection has become necessary in consequence of an incautious felling of wood in the immediate neighbourhood of the mouth, which has exposed the ice to the assaults of the weather.

The commune has let the glaciere for a term of nine years, receiving six or seven hundred francs in all; and the _fermier_ extracts the ice, and sells it in Geneva and Lausanne.