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 débris; 34 
people only appear to have lost their lives there, the inha- 
bitants having betaken themselves to the mountains. 
‘Below Martigny, the débacle, 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 débacle 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 jive 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.’ 
