T
he iron door swings slowly open
and from inside comes an angry
wind, rushing at and around us
like a malevolent spirit let loose.
The lames of our parain lamps
go out as one, and the stray end of my scarf
lies over my shoulder, straining desperately
to escape. “Hold on to your hats and small
children!” shouts Martin, our guide, his
words faint as they’re whipped from his lips.
The wind charges and bufets, doing all it
can to turn us back, but we lower our heads
and push on into the cavern. Martin heaves
the door closed and all is suddenly still
— the spirit silenced.
“Ah, that reminded me of a lovely spring
day back home,” says an Irishman in our
group, with the wry humour of Indiana Jones
ater he’s overcome some iendish obstacle.
As Martin relights our lanterns, and shadows
shit and licker, I decide that there is indeed
something Indiana Jones-ish about all this.
We’d followed a gloomy tunnel with
dripping walls, ridden a cable-car that
shuddered up the mountain, its thin cable
drooping away into nothingness, and made
a inal ascent on a track that zigzagged above
the treeline towards this gaping mouth in
the rock. The temperature had plummeted as
we’d approached, black birds with blood-red
feet making ominous churring calls of alarm.
I’d expected something tamer from a
summertime trip to the Austrian Alps
— more yodelling and cowbells, perhaps.
But here I am, 5,500t up Hochkogel
mountain, in Eisriesenwelt, the world’s
largest ice cave, and it’s no place for
yodellers. Indeed, for centuries, no one at
all set foot inside Eisriesenwelt because it
was thought to be a gateway to hell. Then,
in 1879, Anton Posselt, a plucky scientist
from nearby Salzburg, took the plunge. He
managed to traverse only a few hundred feet
of the cave’s 26 miles before turning back.
A cross scratched into the rock marks the
point he reached — an everlasting reminder
of his achievement, and of his failure, too.
As we pass the cross, I imagine stepping
over the skeleton of his dead dream, the nail
used to scrape its epitaph still clutched by
bony ingers.
Posselt had battled the climb and bettered
the wind, but was beaten by the cave’s
iercest guardian — its ice. Our lamps giveblinkered glimpses of it — dancing circles
of blueish-white that shine wetly back at
us — but these are pin pricks on something
vast lurking in the blackness beyond. The
air seems frozen stif. Martin ignites a lare,
holding it alot like a wizard’s wand, and,
for a moment, the beast is on show. It ills
much of the cave below and alongside us;
a gargantuan dragon of ice — steep and wide
and deadly slippery — spreads through the
bowels of the mountain.
The ice exists, Martin tells us, because
somewhere higher up is another opening,
and the low of wintry air from one
entrance to the other cools the limestone,
freezing the water that drains into the cave.
But we all know that’s an explanation for the
unbelievers. Eisriesenwelt means ‘world of
the ice giants’, and no earthly science should
apply here, because this is a parallel world
for knights and adventurers. It’s a place for
lights of fancy. As we climb the 700 wooden
steps attached to the walls, the icy dragon
shapeshits unseen beside us. In the glare of
a second lare, the frosty head of a dog seems
to rear from the dragon’s back, barking a
soundless warning; a third lare reveals a
horn spiralling to the roof; in the light of a
fourth lare, a cage with icicle bars appears.
There’s a gasp from behind me as a lady
slips and bounces down a few steps on her
backside, but it’s too late to turn back.
In 1913, a speleologist called Alexander
von Mörk inally succeeded in scaling the
dragon’s back and making his way to the
heart of the cave. The following year, he
was dead — the dragon-slayer slain in the
trenches of the First World War — but his
legacy as the champion of Eisriesenwelt was
secure. Not for him an anonymous scratch
in the rock: a huge urn containing his ashes
sits in a niche carved in the wall of the cave’s
largest chamber, the ultimate trophy of a
quest fulilled.
Ater nearly a mile, we come to an
underground lake surrounded by an arcade
of icy columns and arches. “This is as far
as the ice reaches,” Martin announces. “It’s
called the Ice Palace.” And, with a practised
pause and a lourish of his lare, he steps out
onto the lake and tiptoes theatrically across
the surface. It’s a trick easily explained, of
course: a thin ilm of water covers ice several
metres thick and thousands of years old.CLOCKWISE FROM TOP:
Touring the Eisriesenwelt
ice cave within
Hochkogel mountain;
professional climber
and mountain guide
Josef Hiebeler; icicles
in Eisriesenwelt, once
believed to be a gateway
to hell
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