The words were smothered by a tremor grinding through the hollow hush. There was a split, a splintering, a dull boom of titanic weight falling, miles away. They saw the puff of snow dust fly up in a toss of mist over the face of the distant upper crags. Then, a grinding tore the earth; something white glistening viscous crumpled--coiled with untellable furious speed, shaggy and formless, out from the upper peaks--coiled and writhed out like a giant python in titanic torture. For an instant, for less than the fraction of an instant, it poised and coiled and looped as a great white snake in and out among the far upper meadows: then ruptured free with ear splitting wrench. The air was ripped to tatters. The forest, the rock wall, the foundations of the universe gave way; the huge hemlocks were tossing and bending like feathers; the upper forests toppled and spilled like an inverted matchbox. Then the whole world, earth, air, rocks, forest, shot down in a blinding rush, in a viscous torrent of titanic fury. The surface of the mountain crumpled up and peeled in a sliding mass. Wayland came to himself hurled back a hundred feet knocked flat by an invisible blow. The old frontiersman lay clinging to a prone trunk spitting blood and gasping for air. The animals were scrambling to their feet saddles twisted, bridles broken. "'Twas the concussion of the air! A'm not hurt, not a feather o' my head hurt! A've seen it before in the Rockies! Look back," he panted. When the Ranger turned, the clouds of dust were settling, though the earth still rocked. A hundred feet of snow lay across the trail in a wall. Huge trees had been torn from the roots, sucked in, twisted and torted like straws. "Look," reiterated the old frontiersman. Against the rock trail on the other side of the snow slide, three men stood waving frantically. From the time the falling cornice of snow had tossed up in a puff of smoke ten miles away to the fell stroke of the titanic leveller of the ages--not ten seconds had passed. It would have been an even bet that the men on the other side had been caught in the middle of their sentences, in the middle of their signalling. As for the injured man and his companion--Wayland looked down the mountain slope. The snow slide had shot to the bottom and gone quarter way up the other side. "'Twill be safer now to cross to the other side! We can go up above the snow slide and cross by the bare rocks!"