TORRENTS IN FRANCE. O58 
swift course exhibit the most convulsive movements. If you 
overlook from an eminence one of these landscapes furrowed 
with so many ravines, it presents only images of desolation 
and of death. Vast deposits of flinty pebbles, many feet in 
thickness, which have rolled down and spread far over the 
plain, surround large trees, bury even their tops, and rise 
above them, leaving to the husbandman no longer a ray of 
hope. One can imagine no sadder spectacle than the deep 
fissures in the flanks of the mountains, which seem to have 
burst forth in eruption to cover the plains with their ruins. 
These gorges, under the influence of the sun which cracks and 
shivers to fragments the very rocks, and of the rain which 
sweeps them down, penetrate deeper and deeper into the heart 
of the mountain, while the beds of the torrents issuing from 
them are sometimes raised several feet in a single year, by 
the débris, so that they reach the level of the bridges, which, 
of course, are then carried off. The torrent-beds are recog- 
nized at a great distance, as they issue from the mountains, 
and they spread themselves over the low grounds, in fan- 
shaped expansions, like a mantle of stone, sometimes ten thou- 
sand feet wide, rising high at the centre, and curving towards 
the circumference till their lower edges meet the plain. 
“Such is their aspect in dry weather. But no tongue can 
give an adequate description of their devastations in one of 
those sudden floods which resemble, in almost none of their 
phenomena, the action of ordinary river-water. They are now 
no longer overflowing brooks, but real seas, tumbling down in 
cataracts, and rolling before them blocks of stone, which are 
hurled forwards by the shock of the waves like balls shot out 
by the explosion of gunpowder. Sometimes ridges of peb- 
bles are driven down when the transporting torrent does not 
rise high enough to show itself, and then the movement is 
accompanied with a roar louder than the crash of thunder. 
A furious wind precedes the rushing water and announces 
its approach. Then comes a violent eruption, followed by a 
flow of muddy waves, and after a few hours all returns to the 
