Taking off their sandals they held on by their hands and feet to the smooth, shelving, stony wall, at the foot of which lay the darkly-gleaming, fathomless lake.
They had already slided half-way down the incline, when from the mountain opposite arose a muffled, mysterious roar. They felt the cliff on which they lay quaking beneath them.
"Ha! stay where you are," cried Sange Moarte, looking back at them. "An avalanche from the mountain opposite is approaching."
And at the very next moment they could see a white ball descending from the immeasurably distant heights, plunging with mad haste down the mountain slope, tearing away with it whole masses of rock and uprooted pines, swelling every moment into a more tremendous bulk, and dashing down the decline in leaps of two hundred feet at a time into the valley below.
"Heaven defend us!" cried the terrified Clement, clutching his guide with one hand and holding on to the rock with the other. "It is coming this way, and will overwhelm us all."
"Keep still," cried Sange Moarte, seeing them inclined to clamber up again and thus expose themselves to the danger of a fall. "The avalanche will take the direction of that block of rock standing in its way, and will there either stop or disperse."
And indeed they could see that the snow-slip, now grown colossal, was making for a projecting point of rock which was dwarf-like in comparison. Every other sound was lost in the thunder of the avalanche.
And now the huge snow-ball bounded upon the obstructive rock, and fell prone across it with a terrific thud, which shook the whole mountain to its very base.
For a moment the whole region was enveloped in a cloud of steam-like snow-spray, and after the final crash the thunder of the avalanche ceased. But immediately afterwards it began again with a frightful crackling; the weight of the snowy mass had uprooted the obstructing rock, and whirling down with it in dizzy rotations, plunged perpendicularly into the lake below.
The agitated lake, lashed out of its basin on both sides, rose in an enormous wave, three hundred feet high, up to the very spot where the bold climbers were clinging to the naked rock, and after poising in the air for a second, like a huge transparent green column, broke and fell back into the lake, which very slowly subsided.