Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1889-04-06
The Effects of an Avalanche.

from the COrnnlll Magazine
1 enjoyed an excellent opportunity last March
Of inspecting the interior of Staub-Lawine. or
snow-dust avalanche, which fell in the valley of
Davos, below the village of Glarus. At its
deepest point it lay about 60 feet above the
post road, and gallery had been bored
through it with great labor for the passage of
sledges. The walls of this tunnel we're a COM
pact mss of compressed snow, which the work.
men cut into with pickaxes. You could make
no impression on it with your fingers, and the
marks OF the pick were as sharp as on block
Of marble. / noticed the following objects en-
bedded in the portion of the avalanche exposed
to view: Large and small fragments Of gneiss
and limestone: occasionally huge bowlder;
trunks of trees mostly larch and pine, sawed
flush with the snow walls; branches, innumera-
BILE twigs OF cembra, larch, spruce. fir, and al
der, 80 evenly distributed over the whole sur
face that the trees from which they had been
torn must have been stripped by the whirl of
wind and snow-dust; these fragments were so
firmly clutched that you could not scoop them
OUT lastly, and most impressive, massive blocks
OF pure transparent ice, one Of them feet in
length, feet in depth, and how broad do not
know This ice must have been torn by the
blast from frozen waterfalls in the gullies of
the Rutchtobel. The avalanche probably
started at some 5000 feet above the Landwasser,
descending from district known as the Ausser-
berg, which is dominated by the two peaks of
the Leidbachhorn and Aelplihorn 1t was clear
on seeing how stones, stems, branches, twigs,
blocks Of ice, &C., were firmly wrought into the
snow mass that mans body would be mex
tricably claspsd by the same frozen substance.
Standing in the gallery and rejecting on these
things, remembered with thrill Of awe that
somewhere or another, at no great distance,
the corpse OF a man lay actually imbedded
there. He was called Caspar Valar. and he had
been buried in the avalanche upon February
T. Gangs of peasants to the number Of
nifty had dug necessarily for seven days in
the hopes of alighting on his body.
Passing along the road we had seen them
at the stream side, sounding the snow with
poles, breaking 1t up with pickaxes, and delv-
ing into it with spades, and their sad, resigned
faces told how they sorrowed for their COM
rade. His fate might be so easily theirs, too!
The savage Alpine winter claims its victims
yearly. Therefore, hodie tibi crds mihi, q,lod
eras SUM quod IS gro (to-day for thee, to-mor-
row for me; what thou vast I am. what thou
art shall be) seemed written on their earnest
features. At last this labor of the search, will
ingly and without wage given by the men of
Glarus, had to be abandoned as impracticable.
Caspar Valar was left to slumber in his lev Sc
pulchre until the melting avalanche relaxed its
hold in springtime. His widow, meanwhile,
with two young children, went on living in their
chalet on the hill which overlooks the dreadful
thing which robbed her of her husband. On
the Sd OF May she gave birth to Q stillborn
child, and on the same day her husbands corpse
was brought to light. He had been carried
across the stream by the rush of the Staub-
Lawine and his body was in excellent preserve
ton.