The Moving Mountain
NEVER so much as now have I wished that I knew more than a smattering of geology : for two reasons just become urgent.
Monte Arbino, a few miles from Bellinzona, has been slowly cracking for years, and a few days ago a mighty mass, including three minor peaks, fell into the valley of the Arbedo and made a dam across it. The event is unique, unheard of. There are countless mountains in Switzerland and Europe, but only one like this. Evidently we had to go to see it. Apart from mere size and noise and dust, there might be something precious in the mountain's heart.
First I saw it from the road which runs beside the St. Gothard railway—much threatened by coming events. We could see the new dam, about six hundred feet high, and the dust arising from it as new boulders fell ; and we realized that the stream-bed at our feet was empty. Next we found the military road which ascends the broken mountain from the main road, and our car followed its steep and tortuous surface until we had ascended some four thousand feet from the plain.. We had no idea how far we should be allowed to go, but were expecting a barrier with a prohibitory notice, warning us of danger if we disobeyed. We found the barrier, but no notice was necessary. Round one more curve our road ended finally.
The mountain had fallen across it, was, indeed, still falling across it, nor could we guess where the road had been. No military manoeuvres will ever use that road again. We stood on what was left of it and watched and listened for hours. The noise, exactly like artillery, never ceased, whilst stones and rocks, of all sizes up to that of, say, a small cottage, seemed spontaneously to start out of the mountain side, or from the very sky line, and hurl themselves thousands of feet into the valley below. The mighty dam was already scores of feet higher than when we had seen it two days before, and the experts are assured that what must yet fall is manifold as great as the colossal wall of earth and trees and stones and boulders that stretched beneath our eyes. From our viewpoint we could not see the lake which is forming, above the new dam, by the stream which is at present Very low, but will surge and swell when the autumn rains begin. What will happen then, no one knows ; but the inexpert may guess that the rains which raise the lake and its pressure will also fill the vast new cracks in the mountain, will freeze and expand at night, and will hasten the precipitation of millions of tons of rock into the valley, thus strengthening the new dam. One would like to make an encampment on the opposite side of the valley, and watch Nature at work during the next few weeks.
Meanwhile there is something to learn. Science has vindicated itself. The people have not been allowed to Perish for lack of knowledge. The Swiss geologists and mountain engineers, admittedly without superiors any- where, recognized the imminence of the fall, and its precise direction. The inhabitants of the doomed houses —which, one imagines, will never be seen again until the last syllable of recorded time—were all warned and evacuated a few weeks ago. This stupendous event, essentially destructive as it seems and indeed is, has not cost a single human life. The ignorant, jealous and superstitious sneer at science, but when science combines with humanity, yielding us that wisdom which, as Ecclesiasticus tells us, is a " loving spirit," then indeed she is justified of her children.
Something tangible might have come to light already, something we are about to look for everywhere. I am no geologist and neither expected nor made any great find. I picked up some freshly broken fragments of grey granite that had already fallen on the last few inches of the road. Granite is a noble and useful rock, but what I should have liked to pick up would have been pieces of smooth black stuff as unlike granite as any rock can be. Black—not yellow. We have all the gold we need, but scarcely a millionth part of our need of another element compared with which gold is simply yellow mud, and pearls one more disease.
The stuff I did not find is called pitchblende, and a devoted woman, more than a quarter of a century ago in Paris, obtained from it radium, which to-day, where it is to be had, replaces the knife for ever in the treatment of cancer and is the means of escape from hell for tke victims of that dread disease. Mankind must quickly begin to break up mountains and rocks, wherever hope exists of finding this incomparably precious element within them. If the whole of Monte Arbino, or only a thousandth part of it, were made of pitchblende, all the world would soon be kneeling for this bounty at the feet of Switzerland. It is not so : but the geologists who have studied this mountain and others are now our best hope against our worst disease ; and they will not fail us. Their knowledge will ere long be worth its weight
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