Three days after this, on Tuesday, the 21st of September, 1880, we visited the two largest glacières on the Mont Parmelan, near Annecy, France. At Annecy we inquired at the hotel for a man who knew the Mont Parmelan; and, after finding one, we made our way to Les Villaz, where we spent the night in an _auberge_. Our companion was an odd personage. He was small, about fifty years of age, and looked meek, crushed and hungry. He wore a long black frock coat and black trousers, thin boots and a linen shirt, certainly not the ideal outfit for a cave explorer. Under his care we started early in the morning and toiled up a mountain path some eight hundred or a thousand meters,[1] through woods and pastures, to the higher plateau of Mont Parmelan, in which was situated the first glacière. This was in a great pit, at the bottom of which, on one side, was a big cave. On the side of the pit opposite to the opening, there was a steep rock slope, forty or fifty meters long, whose lower portion was covered with snow. Down this slope we descended with but little difficulty, reaching at the bottom an almost level ice floor which spread over the entire cave and was formed throughout of thick, solid ice. A second and much smaller pit in the roof of the cave opened directly over the ice floor; and under this pit rose a small cone of ice, some two meters high, the only one in this glacière. [1] The metric system is used throughout this book, except in a few quotations. Thermometric observations are given in degrees Centigrade. The glacière itself was approximately round in shape, and some twenty meters in diameter. At one place the rock wall was broken and we could look into a much smaller inner cave or chamber. Into this we could not penetrate on account of a long, narrow crack or hole which yawned in the ice floor for a distance of some five or six meters and continued through the opening into the second chamber. We tried to cut our way along the side of the hole, but had to give it up, finding the ice too hard and our time too short. The crack or hole, whose sides were solid ice, proved conclusively that the ice in this glacière was many meters in thickness, for we could look a long way down into the hole, certainly for ten or twelve meters, until the ice sides disappeared in darkness, without any visible bottom. The hole cannot be spoken of as a crevasse, for, besides not looking like a crevasse, it was certainly formed by other causes than those which form the crevasses in glaciers, since there is, as a rule, no perceptible movement in subterranean ice. Doubtless, the hole was due to the drainage of the cave, which undoubtedly passed off through the hole. There may be, nevertheless, some little motion in the ice of this glacière, for it is evident that it is fed principally directly by the winter snows; which, whether as frozen or melted snow, descend gradually, by the force of gravitation, from the slope of the pit into the glacière.