d then be guided by what I might learn among the peasants. Everyone
said there was no chance of getting to anything by that means; but as
the hotel people saw that it was of no use to deny the glacieres any
longer, they proposed to take me to a man who knew the M. Parmelan well,
and could tell me all about it. This man proved to be a keeper of
voitures,--an ominous profession under the circumstances,--and he
assured me that I could make a most lovely _course_ the next day,
through scenery of unrivalled beauty; and he eloquently told on his
fingers the villages and sights I should come to. I suggested--without
in the least knowing that it was so--that the drive might be all very
well in itself, but it would not bring me to the glacieres; on which he
assured me that he knew every inch of the mountain, and there was not
such a thing as a glaciere in the whole district. At this moment, a
gentlemanlike man was brought up by the waiter, and introduced to me as
a monsieur who knew a monsieur who knew the proprietor of one of the
glacieres, and would he happy to conduct me to this second monsieur: so,
without any very ceremonious farewell to the owner of the proffered
voiture, we marched off together down the street, and eventually turned
into a _cafe_, whose master was the monsieur for whom we were in search.
Know the glaciere?--yes, indeed! he had ice from it one year every
morning. His wife and he had made a _course_ to the campagne of M. the
Maire of Aviernoz, and he--the cafetier--had descended for miles, as it
were, down and down, till he came to an underground world of ice,
wonderful, totally wonderful: there he perceived so immense a cold, that
he drank a bottle of rhoom--a whole bottle--and drank it from the neck,
_a l'Anglaise_. And when they had gone so far that great dread came upon
them, they rolled a stone down the ice, and it went into the
darkness--boom, boom, boom,--and he put on a power of ventriloquism
which admirably represented the strange suggestive sound. Hold a moment!
had monsieur a crayon? Yes, monsieur had; so the things were impetuously
swept off a round marble table, and the excited little man drew a fancy
portrait of the glaciere. The way to reach it? Go by diligence to
Charvonnaz--exactly what I had determined upon--and walk up to Aviernoz,
where his good friend the maire would make me see his beautiful
glaciere, through the means of a letter which he went to write. It was
absurd to see this hot lit