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The sun was now shining again as brilliantly as ever; the white clouds were floating lazily across the deep blue sky, and it did not seem as if anything unusual could possibly have happened. Seppi's conscience troubled him. "It was only a thunder-storm after all," he said to Leneli, "and the avalanche is past and gone. It can't do any more harm.
They do not go on, on the other side of the track, monsieur." Chayne saw clearly enough. The two men had been descending the glacier in the afternoon, the avalanche had fallen and swept them down. He dropped upon his knees and peered into the crevasse.
Some day, perhaps not for a long time, but some day, there would be an avalanche, and, in his own language, she "would be in it."
This was all that lay between him and the hideous depth below, for Nigel found on carefully drawing nearer that the avalanche had been more extensive than was apparent from below, and that the ledge beyond the hermit had been also carried away thus cutting off his retreat as well as his advance.
Its unusual formations of cavern and pillar and half-arch led the mind to expect any monstrous stone-shape left by an avalanche or cataclysm. Down and down the fugitives toiled. And now the stream-bed was bare of boulders, and the banks of earth. The floods that had rolled down that canyon had here borne away every loose thing.
At that moment Michael Strogoff threw himself from the tarantass and rushed to his assistance. Endowed with more than common strength, he managed, though not without difficulty, to master the horses. The storm now raged with redoubled fury. A perfect avalanche of stones and trunks of trees began to roll down the slope above them. "We cannot stop here," said Michael.
"I suppose they are good and sensible," said Kate. "Like boiled potatoes, my dear," was the response, "wholesome but perfectly uninteresting." "Is he of that sort?" asked Kate. "No," said her aunt; "not uninteresting, but ungracious. But I like an ungracious man better than one like Philip, who hangs over young girls like a soft-hearted avalanche.
Gathering velocity, and with the materials heaped together from the junction of that already in motion with that about to be moved, the avalanche in sliding a few hundred feet down the slope may become a deep stream of snow-ice, moving with great celerity. At this stage it begins to break off masses of ice from the glaciers over which it may flow, or even to move large stones.
A walking tour with a self-conscious lover of the picturesque—an “interviewer” of Nature with a note-book—worrying you to admire him for admiring Nature so much, is one of those occasional calamities of life which a gentleman and a Christian must sometimes heroically bear, but the very thought of which will paralyze with fear the sturdiest Nature-worshipper, whom no crevasse or avalanche or treacherous mist can appal.
Although a single rapid glance convinced him that the slide had taken place in an unfrequented part of the mountain, above an inaccessible cañon, and reflection assured him his companions could not have reached that distance when it took place, a feverish impulse led him to descend a few rods in the track of the avalanche. The frequent recurrence of outcrop and angle made this comparatively easy.
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