| "On all sides resounded the cracking of the ice amid the roar of the avalanches." |
The travellers carefully avoided the base of these hills; they even took care not to talk aloud, for the sound of the voice could shake the air and cause accident. They were witnesses of frequent and terrible avalanches which they could not have foreseen. In fact, the main peculiarity of polar avalanches is their terrible swiftness; therein they differ from those of Switzerland and Norway, where they form a ball, of small size at first, and then, by adding to themselves the snow and rocks in its passage, it falls with increasing swiftness, destroys forests and villages, but taking an appreciable time in its course. Now, it is otherwise in the countries where arctic cold rages; the fall of the block of ice is unexpected and startling; its fall is almost instantaneous, and any one who saw it from beneath would be certainly crushed by it; the cannon-ball is not swifter, nor lightning quicker; it starts, falls, and crashes down in a single moment with the dreadful roar of thunder, and with dull echoes.
So the amazed spectators see wonderful changes in the appearance of the country; the mountain becomes a plain under the action of a sudden thaw; when the rain has filtered into the fissures of the great blocks and freezes in a single night, it breaks everything by its irresistible expansion, which is more powerful in forming ice than in forming vapor: the phenomenon takes place with terrible swiftness.
No catastrophe, fortunately, threatened the sledge and its drivers; the proper precautions were taken, and every danger avoided. Besides, this rugged, icy country was not of great extent, and three days later, July 3d, the travellers were on smoother ground. But their eyes were surprised by a new phenomenon, which has for a long time claimed the attention of the scientific men of the two worlds. It was this: the party followed a line of hills not more than fifty feet high, which appeared to run on several miles, and their eastern side was covered with red snow.
The surprise and even the sort of alarm which the sight of this crimson curtain gave them may be easily imagined. The doctor hastened, if not to reassure, at least to instruct, his companions; he was familiar with this red snow and the chemical analysis made of it by Wollaston, Candolle, Bäuer. He told them this red snow was not found in the arctic regions alone, but in Switzerland in the middle of the Alps; De Saussure collected a large quantity on the Breven in 1760; and since then Captains Ross, Sabine, and others had brought some back from their arctic journeys.
Altamont asked the doctor about the nature of this extraordinary substance. He was told that its color came simply from the presence of organic corpuscles. For a long time it was a question whether these corpuscles were animal or vegetable; but it was soon ascertained that they belonged to the family of microscopic mushrooms, of the genus Uredo, which Bäuer proposed naming Uredo vivalis.[*]
Then the doctor, prying into the snow with his cane, showed his companions that the scarlet layer was only nine feet deep, and he bade them calculate how many of these mushrooms there might be on a space of many miles, when scientific men estimated forty-three thousand in a square centimetre.
This coloring probably ran back to a remote period, for the mushrooms were not decomposed by either evaporation or the melting of the snow, nor was their color altered.