of the headwaters of the Ganges River in successive rock falls
which lasted for three days. Blocks of stone were projected for a
mile, and clouds of limestone dust were spread over the
surrounding country. The debris formed a dam one thousand feet
high, extending for two miles along the valley. A lake gathered
behind this barrier, gradually rising until it overtopped it in a
little less than a year. The upper portion of the dam then broke,
and a terrific rush of water swept down the valley in a wave
which, twenty miles away, rose one hundred and sixty feet in
height. A narrow lake is still held by the strong base of the dam.

In 1896, after forty days of incessant rain, a cliff of sandstone
slipped into the Yangtse River in China, reducing the width of the
channel to eighty yards and causing formidable rapids.

At Flims, in Switzerland, a prehistoric landslip flung a dam
eighteen hundred feet high across the headwaters of the Rhine. If
spread evenly over a surface of twenty-eight square miles, the
material would cover it to a depth of six hundred and sixty feet.
The barrier is not yet entirely cut away, and several lakes are
held in shallow basins on its hummocky surface.

A slide from the precipitous river front of the citadel hill of
Quebec, in 1889, dashed across Champlain Street, wrecking a number
of houses and causing the death of forty-five persons. The strata
here are composed of steeply dipping slate.

In lofty mountain ranges there may not be a single valley without
its traces of landslides, so common there is this method of the
movement of waste, and of building to grade over-steepened slopes.