It will be better, however, to defer any suggestions on this point till the glaciere has been more fully described.
[Illustration: GROUND PLAN OF THE GLACIERE OF MONTHEZY.

Note: The candle stood at this point.] We passed down at length through the low archway, and stood on the floor of ice.

As our eyes became accustomed to the darkness, we saw that an indistinct light streamed into the cave from some low point at a considerable distance, apparently on a level with the floor; and this we afterwards found to be the bottom of the larger of the two pits we had already fathomed, the pit A of the diagram; and we eventually discovered a similar but much smaller communication with the bottom of the pit B.
In each of these pits there was a considerable pyramid of snow, whose base was on a level with the floor of the glaciere: the connecting archway in the case of the pit A was 3 or 4 feet high, allowing us to pass into the pit and round the pyramid with perfect ease, while that leading to the pit B was less than a foot high, so that no passage could be forced.
As we stood on the ice at the entrance and peered into the comparative darkness, we saw by degrees that the glaciere consisted of a continuous sea of smooth ice, sloping down very gently towards the right hand.

The rock which forms the roof of the cave seemed to be almost as even as the floor, and was from 4 to 5 feet high in the neighbourhood in which we now found ourselves, gradually approaching the floor towards the bottom of the pit B, where it became about a foot high, and rising slightly in that part of the cave where the floor fell, so as to give 9 or 10 feet as the height there.

The ice had all the appearance of great depth; but there were no means of forming a trustworthy opinion on this point, beyond the fact that I succeeded in lowering a stone to a considerable depth, in the small crevice which existed between the wall and the block of ice which formed the floor.