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 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