s down with a terrible noise, swollen with the snows that it
carries down in its furious course; it breaks against the rocks, divides
and joins again like an overflowing stream, and with a wild tempest
blast resumes its desolating course, filling the echoes with the
deafening thunder of battle.

You think for a moment that a storm has begun, but looking at the sky
you see it serenely blue, smiling, cloudless. The rush becomes more and
more violent; it comes nearer, the ground trembles, the trees bend and
break with a sharp crack; enormous stones and blocks of ice are carried
away like gravel; and the mighty avalanche, with a crash like a train
running off the rails over a precipice, drops to the foot of the
mountain, destroying, crushing down everything before it, and covering
the ground with a bed of snow from thirty to fifty feet deep.

When a stream of water wears a passage for itself under this compact
mass, it is sometimes hollowed out into an arched way, and the snow
becomes so solid that carriages and horses can go through without
danger, even in the middle of summer. But often the water does not find
a course by which to flow away; and then, when the snow begins to melt,
the water seeps into the fissures, loosens the mass that chokes up the
valley, and carries it down, rending its banks as it goes, carrying away
bridges, mills, and trees, and overthrowing houses. The avalanche has
become an inundation.

The mountaineers make a distinction between summer and winter
avalanches. The former are solid avalanches, formed of old snow that
has almost acquired the consistency of ice. The warm breath of spring
softens it, loosens it from the rocks on which it hangs, and it slides
down into the valleys. These are called "melting avalanches." They
regularly follow certain tracks, and these are embanked, like the course
of a river, with wood or bundles of branches. It is in order to protect
the alpine roads from these avalanches that those long open galleries
have been built on the face of the precipice.

The most dreaded and most terrible avalanches, those of dry, powdery
snow, occur only in winter, when sudden squalls and hurricanes of
snow throw the whole atmosphere into chaos. They come down in sudden
whirlwinds, with the violence of a waterspout, and in a few minutes
whole villages are buried....

Here, in the Grisons, the whole village of Selva was buried under an
avalanche. Nothing remained visible but the top of