mountains; yet for the greater part of that time, his way led through those fine valleys, full of cultivation and wealth, the inhabitants of which one must not deem to have been more savage than the Tyrolese were in the fifteenth century.[20] Thus he came as far as the Little St. Bernard. Had he reached it a month sooner, in August or the beginning of September, no snow would yet have fallen, and he might every where have found fodder for his cattle. The chief difficulty was the carrying of provisions for thirty or forty thousand men, eight thousand horses, and certainly as many as four thousand mules and pack-horses, which were laden with the bread; for, if the snow fell, it was impossible to get fresh grass for the beasts. A great part of the baggage had been taken by the mountaineers. Until he came to the heights of the Little St. Bernard, Hannibal had not much suffered from the cold; want of food and the enmity of the neighbouring tribes were his worst hardships: but now, when he reached the top of the mountain, he was overtaken by a fall of snow, which made the roads quite impassable. Only think, what a dead stop this must have been for Africans! The greatness of the snowdrifts, by which many deep clefts in the rocks were covered over, soon gave rise to accidents; the feet of the horses slipped, and the animals tumbled down the steeps; fodder was scarce, and many elephants died of cold. The army also suffered from hunger, like the French on their retreat from Russia; in those few days, thousands met with their death. The story of Livy, that Hannibal softened the rocks by fire, and split them by means of vinegar, and thus made a way for himself, is a fable. This is only sometimes possible, when there are cliffs of limestone; but to imagine it in the case of a whole army, and with a mountain like the Alps, is one of those things of which one cannot understand how a man of sense can write them down. Particularly dangerous was the descent: with a great deal of trouble they reached a spot, of which Livy speaks just as incomprehensibly as Polybius does clearly. The roads, in fact, were in some places carried round the mountains, so that on one side there was often an abrupt precipice; now it not unseldom happens that torrents undermine a way like this from beneath, and it falls in; or that avalanches bury it. This had happened here. A bit of the road had fallen in a year before, and it had not yet been mended, as Polybius tells us in the most natural manner. Livy, who takes it for granted that Hannibal had altogether made the road for the first time, says that he had now been stopped all at once by a precipice; and that on this he had ordered trees to be felled, and had had them piled up below against the steep, so as to go down by them as on ladders. But according to Polybius, the landslip went down a stadium and a half, that is to say, a thousand feet in depth, to the bed of the river Dora at the mouth of the valley of Aosta. Hannibal tried to