down toward the plain.

"An earthquake!" exclaimed Paganel. He was not mistaken.
It was one of those cataclysms frequent in Chili, and in
this very region where Copiapo had been twice destroyed,
and Santiago four times laid in ruins in fourteen years.
This region of the globe is so underlaid with volcanic fires
and the volcanoes of recent origin are such insufficient
safety valves for the subterranean vapors, that shocks are of
frequent occurrence, and are called by the people TREMBLORES.

The plateau to which the seven men were clinging, holding on by tufts
of lichen, and giddy and terrified in the extreme, was rushing down
the declivity with the swiftness of an express, at the rate of fifty miles
an hour. Not a cry was possible, nor an attempt to get off or stop.
They could not even have heard themselves speak. The internal rumblings,
the crash of the avalanches, the fall of masses of granite and basalt,
and the whirlwind of pulverized snow, made all communication impossible.
Sometimes they went perfectly smoothly along without jolts or jerks,
and sometimes on the contrary, the plateau would reel and roll like a ship
in a storm, coasting past abysses in which fragments of the mountain
were falling, tearing up trees by the roots, and leveling, as if with
the keen edge of an immense scythe, every projection of the declivity.

How long this indescribable descent would last, no one
could calculate, nor what it would end in ultimately.
None of the party knew whether the rest were still alive, whether one
or another were not already lying in the depths of some abyss.
Almost breathless with the swift motion, frozen with the cold air,
which pierced them through, and blinded with the whirling snow,