When we were there, the water rushed down this trough, and was lost in the pit; and very probably the same may have been the case in the earlier parts of the year, when, according to the view I have already expressed, the ice would under ordinary circumstances have been formed.

If this be so, the caverns below must have received immense additions to their stores of ice or water.

We observed, by the way, that the slope of ice to which the candle descended in the deeper pit, and the shelf on which it rested, were quite dry, or at any rate free from all apparent signs of the abundant water we should have seen, had that been the outlet for the streams which poured into the _moulin_.

The maire said that the columns and cascades of ice in the cave had been much more beautiful in the previous summer.
The whole cavern would thus appear to be something of the shape of an egg, with the longer axis vertical, and the entrance about half-way up the side.

The lower end of this egg-shaped cavity in the rock is filled with ice, which in some parts shrinks from the rock below the surface, though, as far as outward appearance goes, it fills the cavern to its farthest corners.