The extraordinary power of the wind, which at times accompanies an avalanche, is well known and dreaded. A case is recorded in which a woman, walking to church, was lifted up into the air and carried to the top of a lofty pine, in which position she remained lodged until discovered and rescued by the returning congregation. The avalanche exhibits a striking picture of ruin which nature inflicts upon her own creations; she buildeth up and taketh down; she lifts the mountains by her subterranean energies, and then blasts them by her lightnings, frosts, thaws, and avalanches: “As where, by age, or rains, or tempests torn, A rock from some high precipice is borne; Trees, herds, and swains involving in the sweep, The mass flies furious from the aerial steep, Leaps down the mountain’s side, with many a bound, In fiery whirls, and smokes along the ground.”[95] Every movement that is grand or beautiful in the course of rushing waters seems to be the mission of mountain streams to illustrate. The fierce rivers rush over rocks with such aimless force that the violence of the torrent creates a back sweep of the overdriven, mad waves; here and there in the bed of these rivers are seen blocks of stone, many of them as large as a good-sized house, heaped up most strangely, jammed in by their angles, in equilibrium on a point, or forming perilous bridges over which you may with proper precaution pick your way to the other side. The quarry from which the materials of this bridge came is just above your head, and the miners are still at work,--air, water, frost, weight, and time. Other blocks are only waiting for the last moment of the great lever of nature to take the horrid leap, and bury under some hundred feet of new chaotic ruins the trees and the verdant lawn below. All round is the sound of water, the beat of the waves on the shore, the onward flowing of the river, the rush of the torrent, the splash of the waterfall, or the bubbling of some little stream; everywhere the music of a hurrying stream accompanies you. Every valley has its roar and rush of water and cataracts leaping to join the chorus of torrents below, making one appreciate Wordsworth’s line,-- “The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep.”