The distance, he declared, was
twenty minutes. The woman at the _auberge_ strongly recommended the
source, but did her best to dissuade us from the glacieres, of which she
said there were two. She had visited them herself, and told her husband,
who had guided her, that there was nothing to see. That, we thought,
proved nothing against the glacieres, and her dulness of appreciation we
were willing to accept without further proof than her personal
appearance. Besides, to go to the source, and not to Arc, would mean
dining with her; so that she was not an impartial adviser.
M. Paget was a short square man, of very few words, and his one object
in life seemed to be to save his black horse as much as possible; a
very creditable object in itself, so long as he did not go too far in
his endeavours to accomplish it. On the present occasion he certainly
did go too far. The road was quite as good as that which we had left,
and there was no reason in the world why the carriage should not have
taken us to the village. Worse still, we discovered eventually that
the 'twenty minutes' meant twenty minutes from the village to the
source, and represented really something like half the time necessary
for that part of the march, while there was a hot and dusty walk of
half an hour before we reached the village.
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