954 TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 
dreary silence which at periods of rest marks these abodes of 
desolation.* 
“The elements of destruction are increasing in violence. 
The devastation advances in geometrical progression as the 
higher slopes are bared of their wood, and ‘the ruin from 
above,’ to use the words of a peasant, ‘helps to hasten the deso- 
lation below.’ 
“The Alps of Provence present a terrible aspect. In the 
more equable climate of Northern France, one can form no 
conception of those parched mountain gorges where not even 
a bush can be found to shelter a bird, where, at most, the 
wanderer sees in summer here and there a withered lavender, 
where all the springs are dried up, and where a dead silence, 
hardly broken by even the hum of an insect, prevails. But if 
a storm bursts forth, masses of water suddenly shoot from the 
mountain heights into the shattered gulfs, waste without irri- 
gating, deluge without refreshing the soil they overflow in 
their swift descent, and leave it even more seared than it was 
from want of moisture. Man at last retires from the fearful 
desert, and I have, the present season, found not a living soul 
in districts where I remember to have enjoyed hospitality thirty 
years ago.” 
In 1853, ten years after the date of Blanqui’s memoir, M. de 
Bonville, prefect of the Lower Alps, addressed to the Govern- 
ment a report in which the following passages occur: 
“Tt is certain that the productive mould of the Alps, swept 
* These explosive gushes of mud and rock appear to be occasioned by the 
caying-in of large masses of earth from the banks of the torrent, which dam 
up the stream and check its flow until it has acquired volume enough to burst 
the barrier and carry all before it. In 1827, such a sudden eruption of a 
torrent, after the current had appeared to have ceased, swept off forty-two 
houses and drowned twenty-eight persons in the village of Goncelin, near 
Grenoble, and buried with rubbish a great part of the remainder of the 
village. 
The French traveller, D’Abbadie, relates precisely similar occurrences as not 
unfrequent in the mountains of Abyssinia. —SuRELL, tudes, etc., 2d edition, 
pp. 224, 295. 
