BtANQUl's MEMOIRK 71 



of the province of Constantine ; for there you can travel on horseback, and 

 you find grass in the spring, whereas in more than fifty communes in the 

 Alps there is absolutely nothing. 



" The clear, brilliant, Alpine sky of Embrun, of Gap, of Barcelonette, and 

 of Digne, which for months is without a cloud, produces droughts interrupted 

 only by diluvial rains like those of the tropics. The abuse of the right of 

 pasturage and the felling of the woods have stripped the soil of all its grass 

 and aU. its trees, and the scorching sun bakes it to the consistency of 

 porphyry. When moistened by the rain, as it has neither support nor 

 cohesion, it rolls down to the valleys, sometimes in floods resembling black, 

 yellow, or reddish lava, sometimes in streams of pebbles, and even huge 

 blocks of stone, which pour down with a frightful roar, and in their 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, pene- 

 trate 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 debris, so that that they reach the level of the bridges, which, 

 of course, are then carried off. The torrent-beds are recognized 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 thousand 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 forward by the shock of the waves like balls shot out by the 

 explosion of gunpowder. Sometimes ridges of pebbles 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 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 desolation 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, 



