Three storms in one valley

From a traveller in the Val d’Aosta, written afterward, to a sister in England. Imagined.

My dear Anne, we are alive, which I put first so that you may read the rest calmly. I would tell it in order, but it happened all at once.

We had come up the valley on mules with our guide, a boy of perhaps fifteen, and a goat that attached itself to us at the last village and would not be sent home. By noon the mountains ahead had vanished. Not clouded over: vanished, as completely as a drawing wiped off a slate. In their place hung a white wall that turned, slowly, like water going down a drain. Snow came out of it sideways. Then thunder, which I had not known could happen in snow. Then, high on the right, a sound like a cart of stones tipped over a cliff, and a pale tongue of something came down the slope and the torrent below us went white and furious and twice its size.

We got down among the rocks at the bottom of the valley, all of us in a heap, cloaks over our heads. I remember the colours more than anything: the gold that still came through on one side, the brown of the earth, and in the middle that tremendous grey-white spiral, with a gleam of blue sky right up in its eye. The goat stood a little apart from us on a rock, watching the performance with interest, and I envied it.

You will think I exaggerate. I tell you there is a man who could have painted it. Mr. Turner travelled in this valley in 1836, they told us at the inn, and was famous for making storms look the way they feel from inside. If he had stood where we lay he would have left out the path and the sky and the shape of the hills, and put in only that great turning, and us, very small, at the bottom of it.

Your loving brother, Tom

Tom, his goat and his sister are invented. J. M. W. Turner did tour the Val d’Aosta in 1836, and the next year finished this canvas, which piles a snowstorm, an avalanche and a thunderstorm into a single vortex. The figures huddled in its lower right corner are his.

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