I now looked on the local map, and determined that the best plan would be to take the Bonneville diligence as far as Charvonnaz, the point on the road which seemed to lie nearest to the roots of the Mont Parmelan, and 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 little man sign himself ‘Dugravel, glacier,’ that being the style of his profession, naturally recalling the contradictory conduct of the Latin noun lucus.