the church steeple,
looking like a pole planted in the snow. Baron Munchausen might have
tied his horse there without inventing any lie about it. The Val
Verzasca was covered for several months by an avalanche of nearly 1,000
feet in length and 50 in depth. All communication through the valley
was stopt; it was impossible to organize help; and the alarm-bell was
incessantly sounding over the immense white desolation like a knell for
the dead.

In the narrow defile in which we now are, there are many remains of
avalanches that neither the water of the torrent nor the heat of the sun
has had power to melt. The bed of the river is strewn with displaced and
broken rocks, and great stones bound together by the snow as if with
cement; the surges dash against these rocky obstacles, foaming angrily,
with the blind fury of a wild beast. And the moan of the powerless water
flows on into the depth of the valley, and is lost far off in a hollow
murmur.

HUNTING THE CHAMOIS[61]

BY VICTOR TISSOT

Schmidt swept with his cap the snow which covered the stones on which
we were to seat ourselves for breakfast, then unpacked the provisions;
slices of veal and ham, hard-boiled eggs, wine of the Valtelline. His
knapsack, covered with a napkin, served for our table. While we sat, we
devoured the landscape, the twelve glaciers spreading around us their
carpet of swansdown and ermine, sinking into crevasses of a magical
transparency, and raising their blocks, shaped into needles, or into
Gothic steeples with pierced arches. The architecture of the glacier is
marvelous. Its decorations are the decorations of fairyland. Quite near
us marks of animals in the snow attracted our attention. Schmidt said to
us:

"Chamois have been here this morning; the traces are quite fresh. They
must have seen us and made off; the chamois are as distrustful, you see,
as the marmots, and as wary. At this season they keep on the glaciers by
preference. They live on so little! A few herbs, a few mosses, such as
grow on isolated rocks like this. I assure you it is very amusing to see
a herd of twenty or thirty chamois cross at a headlong pace a vast field
of snow, or glacier, where they bound over the crevasses in play.

"One would say they were reindeers in a Lapland scene. It is only at
night that they come down into the valleys. In the moonlight they come
out of the moraines, and go to pasture on the grassy slopes or in the
forest adjoining the glaciers.