248 TOREEISTTS EST FRANCE. 



all returns to tlie dreary silence whicli at periods of rest marks 

 tliese 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 desolation below.' 



"The Alps of Provence present a terrible aspect. In the 

 more equable climate of Northern France, one can form no con- 

 ception 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 guKs, waste without irrigating, deluge without re- 

 freshing the son 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 en- 

 joyed hospitahty 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 Government 

 a report in which the following passages occur : 



"It is certain that the productive mould of the Alps, swept 

 off by the increasing violence of that curse of the mountains, the 

 torrents, is daily diminishing with fearful rapidity. All our Alps 

 are wholly, or in large proportion, bared of wood. Their soil, 

 scorched by the sun of Provence, cut up by the hoofs of the sheep, 

 which, not finding on the surface the grass they require for their 



* These explosive gushes of mud and rock appear to be occasioned by the 

 caving-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 tor- 

 rent, 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. See p. 

 232, noU. 



The French traveller, D'Abbadie, relates precisely similar occurrences as 

 not unfrequent in the mountains of Abyssinia. — Surell, J^tudes, etc., 2d edi- 

 tion, pp. 224, 295. 



