264 THE FOREST LANDS OF FINLAND. 



' There it divided, but 800 of the houses of this town 

 were carried away, many others were damaged, and the 

 streets were strewn with trees and earthen debris; 34 

 people only appear to have lost their lives there, the inha- 

 bitants having betaken themselves to the mountains. 



' Below Martigny, the debacle, finding a great plain, 

 spread itself out and deposited a great deal of mud and 

 wood, and that to such an extent as to render healthful, as 

 was hoped, a great marsh there. The Rhone received it 

 little by little, and at different parts of its course, without 

 overflowing; it reached the Lake of Geneva at eleven 

 o'clock at night, and was lost in the great extent of that 

 lake, having traversed a course of 18 leagues, or upwards 

 of 50 miles, through Switzerland, in six hours and a half, 

 by a movement gradually retarded. 



* All the bridges having been carried away, the inhabi- 

 tants on the two sides of the Drause could have no com- 

 munication for some days, or inform one another of their 

 respective losses, but by throwing across the river notes 

 attached to stones; and the putrifying slime threatened 

 them with an epidemic. It is somewhat remarkable that 

 an old man of ninety-two saved himself by getting on a 

 hillock supposed to have been formed by a ddbacle in 

 ancient times; the new one followed him to the very 

 summit, where he maintained his footing by the aid of a 

 tree which was not carried away. 



' M. Escher estimated at eight hundred millions of cubic 

 feet the mass of water which had accumulated at the time 

 it began to flow out by the tunnel. This mass had been 

 reduced to five hundred and thirty millions in the course of 

 the three days following, and the level of the lake was 

 lowered by 45 feet. If the tunnel had not been made the 

 lake would have risen 50 feet higher, and the mass of 

 water would have attained a measurement of seventeen 

 hundred and fifty millions of cubic feet when it began to 

 flow over the dyke, instead of the five hundred and thirty 

 millions to which it had been reduced when it began to 

 pass across the tunnel, and would have spread its ravages 

 over the whole of the lower Valais.' 



