V.
Sometimes here, after a broiling day, the clouds gather, the air is stifling, one feels fairly ill, and a storm bursts forth. There was such an one last night. Each moment the heavens opened, cleft by an immense flash, and the vault of darkness lifted itself entire like a tent. The dazzling light marked out the limits of the various cultures and the forms of the trees at the distance of a league. The glaciers flamed with a bluish glimmer; the jagged peaks suddenly lifted themselves upon the horizon like an army of spectres.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
The gorge was illumined in its very depths; its heaped-up blocks, its trees hooked on to the rocks, its torn ravines, its foaming Gave, were seen under a livid whiteness, and vanished like the fleeting visions of an unknown and tortured world.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
Soon the voice of the thunder rolled in the gorges; the clouds that bore it crept midway along the mountain side, and came into collision among the rocks; the report burst out like a discharge of artillery. The wind rose and the rain came on. The inclined plane of the summits opened up under its squalls; the funeral drapery of the pines clung to the sides of the mountain. A creeping plain came out from the rocks and trees. The long streaks of rain thickened the air; under the flashes you saw the water streaming, flooding the summits, descending the two slopes, sliding in sheets over the rocks, and from all sides in hurried waves running to the Gave. In the morning the roads were cut up with sloughs, the trees hung by their bleeding roots, great patches of earth had fallen away, and the torrent was a river.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
