AVALANCHES[60]

BY VICTOR TISSOT

Beside this dazzling, magnificent snow, covering the chain of lofty peaks like an immaculate altar cloth, what a gloomy, dull look there is in the snow of the plains!  One might think it was made of sugar or confectionery, that it was false like all the rest.

To know what snow really is—­to get quit of this feeling of artificial snow that we have when we see the stunted shrubs in our Parisian gardens wrapt, as it were, in silk paper like bits of Christmas trees—­it must be seen here in these far-off, high valleys of the Engandine, that lie for eight months dead under their shroud of snow, and often, even in the height of summer, have to shiver anew under some wintry flakes.

It is here that snow is truly beautiful!  It shines in the sun with a dazzling whiteness; it sparkles with a thousand fires like diamond dust; it shows gleams like the plumage of a white dove, and it is as firm under the foot as a marble pavement.  It is so fine-grained, so compact, that it clings like dust to every crevice and bend, to every projecting edge and point, and follows every outline of the mountain, the form of which it leaves as clearly defined as if it were a covering of thin gauze.  It sports in the most charming decorations, carves alabaster facings and cornices on the cliffs, wreathes them in delicate lace, covers them with vast canopies of white satin spangled with stars and fringed with silver.

And yet this dry, hard snow is extremely susceptible to the slightest shock, and may be set in motion by a very trifling disturbance of the air.  The flight of a bird, the cracking of a whip, the tinkling of bells, even the conversation of persons going along sometimes suffices to shake and loosen it from the vertical face of the cliffs to which it is clinging; and it runs down like grains of sand, growing as it falls, by drawing down with it other beds of snow.  It is like a torrent, a snowy waterfall, bursting out suddenly from the side of the mountain; it rushes 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.