244 
TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 
there will rise, I am sure, more than one voice from the spots 
themselves, to attest the rigorous exactness of this picture of 
their wretchedness. I have never seen its equal even in the 
Kabyle villages 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 all its trees, and the scorching sun bakes it to the 
consistence 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. Yast 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, penetrate 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 they reach the level of the bridges, which, 
of course, are then carried off. The torrent beds are recog¬ 
nized at a great distance, as they issue from the mountains, 
and they spread themselves over the low grounds, in fan- 
