Switzerland

decoratively to adorn a mountain-side. Neither impression represents all of the truth. Avalanches are destructive, and glaciers decorative. But the avalanche is normally, to

che is the sign

r acris

y be sometimes terrible in its destruction, as in lower lands a flood may sometimes be; but on their record, year by year, they do not cause any appalling loss of life or of property. Some deaths, some destruction, can be set

spring. This spring avalanche is no sudden freak of Nature, but an inevitable affair, slowly engendered. The snow that piles up during the winter months, on what in summer are the grass slopes below the snow-line, gradually becomes unstable as spring melting advances. The mass loses its cohesion, ceases to bind firmly together, and tends to flow downwards. The trend of the ground decides the way of its fall.

this pours down rather than falls down the hill slope. Sir Martin Conway recalls his

ad within a couple of hours. Then they stopped. On the Italian side similar conditions obtained, but it was not till I reached Isella that the greatest fall took place, or rather was taking place, for it had begun before I arrived, and it continued after I had passed. There, a narrow gorge, with vertical cliff-sides facing one another, debouches on the main valley. It leads upwards to a great cirque in the hills, a cirque that is a grass-covered alpine pasture in the summer. The avalanche was pou

lishing its sides, came forth with an aspect of weight and resistless force that was extraordinarily impressive. Yet Nature did not seem to be acting violently, though her might was plain to see. She appeared to act with deliberation: one looked for an end of th

e of things they travel far and fall low, well into the tree-belt, and even down to the chestnut-level on the Italian side. It is a strange sight to see these vast, new-fallen masses lying in their accustomed beds, but surrounded by trees all freshly verdant with the gifts of spring. Yearly each one falls in the

s destruction by its agency. The Swiss people, so practical, so economical, so courageous, carry on a persistent scientific campaign against the unruly element in these torrents of ice, setting up lines of defence everywhere. The first and most important line of defence is the forest; and for this reason the forest laws of Switzerland are very severe. A man is not allowed t

s, are now being taken, and most of the well-known avalanche tracks are being surrounded by various defensive works designed to arrest any tendency to mischief that they show. Destruction from avalanches there will continue to be in exceptional cases, for Nature insists, now and again, on displaying some unwonted, abnormal display of her power which sets at nought all precautions of man. A Titanic goes to th

ional tornadoes which spring up on the mountain slopes, and is driven down on the wings of the wind to the valley below. This form of avalanche is, because of its suddenness, the most dangerous to human life, and is also the most dif

The home of John

hing snow, which tied his legs, pinned his arms to his ribs, and crawled upward to his throat. There it stopped. His head emerged, and he could breathe; but as the mass set, he felt the impossibility of expanding his lungs, and knew that he must die of suffocation. At the poin

which is just as usual and inevitable a process of Nature as the growing of the trees or the splitting of rocks by frost, has been very largely reduced. This form of avalanche can be traced to its sour

in a hideous fashion. The Staub-Lawine is fury-laden like a fiend in its first swirling onset, flat and stiff like a corpse in its ultimate repose of death, containing men and beasts and trees entombed beneath its stern unwrinkled taciturnity of marble. The Schlag-Lawine is picturesque, rising into romantic spires and turrets, with erratic pine-plumed firths protruding upon sleepy meadows. It may even lie pure and beautiful, heaving in

s best avoided: and the difference between death by the Grund-Lawine and death by the Staub-Lawine is purely ?sthetic. And the Grund usually kills quickly whilst the Staub may take a freakish turn and bury you alive in a cranny or cavern which the avalanche has sealed by passing over it. Men have slowly died of hunger in such circumstances. Yet, so long as life lasts, there is hope; no pains are spared in ransacking the snow after an avalanche; and cases of almost miraculous delivera

e family and all her children, who escaped unhurt. In 1720 an avalanche demolished fifteen houses. In one of them a party of twenty-six young men and women were assembled. They were all buried in the snow, and only three survived. Altogether thirty-six persons perished at that time. In 1812 a similar catastrophe occurred, destroying houses and stables. But on this occasion the inhabitants had been forewarned and left the village. A curious story is told about the avalanch

ginal cause of the snow-fall. The blast of the avalanche is known as the Lawinen-Dunst, and many thrilling stories are told of hairbreadth escapes from its blast. A carter driving with a sledge and two horses across the Albula Pass was hurled-horses, sledge, and all-across a gully by the wind. A wom

heir natural surroundings. Such a one as the Silvretta, for instance, stretching its length for nearly twenty miles across the mountains, looks magnificently vast. From a distance a glacier seems to be white, with bands of grey, or of black from the moraines (strips of earth and stones showing on the surface). Studied at close hand it is a pageant of varied colours due to the variations of light and shade on its surface, and to the manner in which the refraction of the light is affected by the partial melting of the topmost layer of the snow. From this melting come little trickles of water which combine to form streams and then torrents. The beds of these torrents are blue in colour and like transparent glass-a lovely contrast with the general surface of the glacier. For

ciers I have freely quoted) gives the palm for gl

h a frosted radiance. It is not the same at dawn after a cold night, for then there is no water between the fragments, but all is hard and solid. No sooner, however, does the sun shine upon them, than the bonds are released and the ice-crystals begin to break up with a gentle tinkling sound and little flashes of light reflected from tiny wet mirror-surfaces. One can spend hours watching these small phenomena as happily as gazing upon the great mountains themselves. Size is a relative term. The biggest mountain in relation to the earth is no greater than is one of these small ice-fragments in relation to a glacier. Reduce th

AND GREAT ALE

a sea of ice. Sometimes, too, inequalities in the bed of the glacier acting with the pressure of the ice mass cause great

at they should arrange to camp for some days in the glacier region. But there ar