“The warm rain kept plugging down all day, and was still pelting hard when I went to sleep that night. Towards morning I was waked up with a roar a hundred times louder than any snow-slide I ever heard, and then came a jar that rocked the whole valley. I felt sure a piece of the cliff had come down, but didn’t have the least hunch that anything like what the first daylight showed up had come off. The first thing I saw as the dark slacked off was the shimmer of a flat stretch of water in the bottom of the valley, a lake--just as if it had been dropped from the sky--right where we’d been trying to start one ourselves. “The cliff had broken back a couple of hundred feet or more all the way to the top, and in falling had piled up clear across the head of the gorge. On the near side it was about one hundred and fifty feet high, on the farther side something like sixty. “With the rain still pouring pitchforks and the snow melting all over the mountains, water was coming down at a rate that had the lake rising at the rate of two feet an hour all morning, and better than half that fast even when it began to spread out over the valley floor in the afternoon. The storm kept right on for three days. The second morning there was twenty-five feet of water at the dam, on the third forty feet and on the fourth near to fifty. The lake by this time was both bigger and deeper than the one we’d planned to make ourselves. “By good luck the streams ramping down from the mountains into the gorge below the slide kept two or three times its average flow in the river, and so the Austrians--who didn’t know its habits very well--failed to notice that anything unusual had come off up-stream. Our scouts reported that the water in the lower lake had not risen much, and that it seemed to stand at about fifteen feet above the danger mark. The Austrians, they said, did not appear to be paying any more attention to the dam than usual. “We were hoping that the storm would hold until enough water was backed up to bust the dam on its own, but when it began to clear on the fourth day it was plain the best way out of it was to give the thing a push on our own account. We didn’t have a hundredth of enough ‘giant’ to do the job, so had to rig the best makeshift we could by turning the still husky stream of my ‘hydraulic’ right along the sloping top of the slide and off down into the gorge. “It was about midday when we set it sluicing, and all afternoon it licked off the loose earth as if it was sugar. By dark half the near end of the slide had slushed away, and the wall that still held was beginning to bulge and cave with the seep forced through from the other side. Half an hour later our pitch-pine torches showed the water bubbling through all the way along, and we knew it was time for us to clear out. It was none too soon either, for the last man was just out of the way when a heavy sort of rolling-grind started, and then--whouf!--out she went.