The Swiss classify avalanches into several sorts. The first of these, in order of maturity, is the Staub-Lawine or Dust-Snow Avalanche. This is a collection of loose snow, freshly fallen, which has been caught up in one of those sectional tornadoes which spring up on the mountain slopes, and is driven down on the wings of the wind to the valley below. This form of avalanche is, because of its suddenness, the most dangerous to human life, and is also the most difficult to provide against. Measures to prevent the accumulation of drift snow in dangerous pockets or wind-swept slopes are in some degree efficacious. Mr. Symonds records the experience of a Swiss who was caught in a Dust-Avalanche:
DAVOS IN WINTER. The home of John Addington Symonds.
A human victim of the dreadful thing, who was so lucky as to be saved from its clutch, once described to me the sensations he experienced. He was caught at the edge of the avalanche just when it was settling down to rest, carried off his feet, and rendered helpless by the swathing snow, which tied his legs, pinned his arms to his ribs, and crawled upward to his throat. There it stopped. His head emerged, and he could breathe; but as the mass set, he felt the impossibility of expanding his lungs, and knew that he must die of suffocation. At the point of losing consciousness, he became aware of comrades running to his rescue. They hacked the snow away around his thorax, and then rushed on to dig for another man who had been buried in the same disaster, leaving him able to breathe, but wholly powerless to stir hand or foot.
The usual spring avalanche is called the Schlag-Lawine or Stroke-Avalanche. These, as already described, push down a slope of the mountains like a swiftly flowing river. Danger from the Schlag-Lawine, which is just as usual and inevitable a process of Nature as the growing of the trees or the splitting of rocks by frost, has been very largely reduced. This form of avalanche can be traced to its sources and its course and flow regulated by channels and break-ices. It has a secondary form called the Grund-Lawine or ground avalanche. This is the avalanche which aroused the poetic anger of Mr. Symonds:
The peculiarity of a Grund-Lawine consists in the amount of earth and rubbish carried down by it. This kind is filthy and disreputable. It is coloured brown or slaty-grey by the rock and soil with which it is involved. Blocks of stone emerge in horrid bareness from the dreary waste of dirty snow and slush of water which compose it; and the trees which have been so unlucky as to stand upon its path are splintered, bruised, rough-handled in a hideous fashion. The Staub-Lawine is fury-laden like a fiend in its first swirling onset, flat and stiff like a corpse in its ultimate repose of death, containing men and beasts and trees entombed beneath its stern unwrinkled taciturnity of marble. The Schlag-Lawine is picturesque, rising into romantic spires and turrets, with erratic pine-plumed firths protruding upon sleepy meadows. It may even lie pure and beautiful, heaving in pallid billows at the foot of majestic mountain slopes where it has injured nothing. But the Grund-Lawine is ugly, spiteful like an asp, tatterdemalion like a street Arab; it is the worst, the most wicked of the sisterhood. To be killed by it would mean a ghastly death by scrunching and throttling, as in some grinding machine, with nothing of noble or impressive in the winding-sheet of foul snow and débris heaved above the mangled corpse.
But the Grund-Lawine is really the most beneficial avalanche of the Alps, doing quickly the work, which a glacier does slowly, of carrying down soil from the heights to the plains. It is rare in the Swiss Alps, more common in mountains of younger age going through earlier processes of disintegration. Perhaps, if one is to look at an avalanche chiefly as an instrument of death, the Grund-Lawine has a greater objectionableness than the Staub-Lawine. But any form of death by avalanche is best avoided: and the difference between death by the Grund-Lawine and death by the Staub-Lawine is purely æsthetic. And the Grund usually kills quickly whilst the Staub may take a freakish turn and bury you alive in a cranny or cavern which the avalanche has sealed by passing over it. Men have slowly died of hunger in such circumstances. Yet, so long as life lasts, there is hope; no pains are spared in ransacking the snow after an avalanche; and cases of almost miraculous deliverance occasionally occur. One February (records Mr. Symonds) a young man called Domiziano Roberti, in the neighbourhood of Giornico, saw an avalanche descending on him. He crept under a great stone, above which there fell a large tree in such a position that it and the stone together roofed him from the snow, which soon swept over him and shut him up. There he remained 103 hours in a kind of semi-somnolence, and was eventually dug out, speechless and frightfully frost-bitten, but alive.
The avalanche record of a single village (Fetan) of Switzerland—a village which is characterised as a very unlucky one—will give some idea of the real extent of the toll of the avalanche. In the year 1682 a great avalanche swept over it. Six persons were killed, but the rest of the villagers, expecting some such catastrophe, had abandoned their houses. In one dwelling nothing was left standing but the living-room and one bedroom. These, however, contained the mother of the family and all her children, who escaped unhurt. In 1720 an avalanche demolished fifteen houses. In one of them a party of twenty-six young men and women were assembled. They were all buried in the snow, and only three survived. Altogether thirty-six persons perished at that time. In 1812 a similar catastrophe occurred, destroying houses and stables. But on this occasion the inhabitants had been forewarned and left the village. A curious story is told about the avalanche of 1812. One of the folk of Fetan, after abandoning his home to its fate, remembered that he had forgotten to bring away his Bible. In the teeth of the impending danger, through the dark night, he waded back across the snowdrifts, and saved the book. In 1888 there was further destruction at this village by avalanche, but with no loss of life. That is a particularly unlucky village, evidently badly situated. But since 1720 the snow-falls have caused no loss of life there.
The down-coming of an avalanche, if it be sudden and swift, is often accompanied by a great blast of wind, which gives it an additional danger. This wind may in some cases be partly caused by the displacement of the air from the fall; in most cases, it is probable, the wind was in chief part the original cause of the snow-fall. The blast of the avalanche is known as the Lawinen-Dunst, and many thrilling stories are told of hairbreadth escapes from its blast. A carter driving with a sledge and two horses across the Albula Pass was hurled—horses, sledge, and all—across a gully by the wind. A woman was lifted into the air and carried to the top of a lofty pine-tree, to which she clung and was saved. Of more tragic tone is the record of the man lifted by an avalanche blast and smashed to pieces against a stone, of a house lifted up in the air and dashed down, killing most of its inhabitants.