As early as the breaking-away of the first rocks, we watchers could feel the hill under us tremble, though we were many li distant from the very nearest of those rockslides. The valley floor had to be quivering then, too, but the two armies conjoined in battle still took no notice; or, if they did, every man and woman no doubt believed it to be only his or her own personal quaking of fear and rage. I remember thinking: that must be the way we mortals will ignore the first tremors of Armageddon, continuing to pursue our trivial and pitiful and spiteful little strifes even while God is loosing the unimaginable devastation that will end the world and all.

But a goodly piece of the world was being devastated right here. The falling rocks dislodged other rocks below them and, rolling and sliding, they gouged up great swathes and whole zonte of earth and then, rocks and earth together, they scoured their various mountainsides of their vegetation, the trees toppling and colliding and heaping up and overlying and splintering, and then the surface of each mountain and everything that grew upon it or was contained within it—boulders, rocks, stones, clods, loose earth, meadow-sized pieces of rumpled turf, trees, bushes, flowers, probably even the forest creatures caught unawares—all came down, down into the valley, in a dozen or more separate avalanches, and the noise of them, until now delayed by distance, finally began to batter our ears. It was a mutter that grew to a growl that grew to a roar that grew to a thunder, but a thunder like I never heard before—not even in the unstable heights of the Pai-Mir, where the noises had often been loud, but never for longer than a few minutes. This thunder here continued to grow in volume and to create echoes and to collect and absorb the echoes, and to bellow ever louder, as if it never would reach its loudest. Now the hill on which we stood was quivering like a jelly—the noise alone might have been enough to shake it—so that we could scarcely keep our feet, and all the trees nearby us were rustling so they shed many of their leaves, and birds were bursting up everywhere, squawking and screeching, and the very air around us seemed to quake.

The rumblings of the several avalanches would have overwhelmed the noise of battle in the valley, but there was no more of that shouting and war-crying and clinking together of sword blades. The poor people had at last perceived what was happening, and so had the camp’s herds of horses, and the people and horses were scurrying hither and thither. Being myself in a state of some agitation, I could not too well discern what the people were doing individually. I saw them rather as an indistinct mass—like the blurred masses of landscape coming down the mountains roundabout—the thousands of people and horses all running in a tremendous, untidy bunch. The way they were moving, I might have thought the whole valley floor was tilting back and forth and sloshing them from side to side of it. Except for the numbers already struck down in combat, lying motionless or moving only feebly, the people and horses seemed first, and all at the same time, to glimpse the havoc hurtling toward them down the western slopes, and they all ran in a body away from there, only to see the other calamity coming down the eastern slopes, and all in a body they surged back again to the middle of the valley floor, all but a few who jumped into the river, as if they were fleeing a forest fire and might find safety in the cool water. Some two or three dozen individuals—I did make out that much—were running straight down the valley’s middle, toward us, and probably others were scampering up it in the other direction. But the avalanches were moving faster than any mere human could.

And down they came. Though the swooping blurs of brown and green contained whole forests of full-sized trees and countless boulders as big as houses, they looked, from where we stood, like cascades of dirty, gritty, lumpy tsampa porridge being poured down the sides of a giant tureen to puddle in its bottom, and the towering clouds of dust they raised on the way looked like the steam rising from that tsampa porridge. When the several separate slides reached the lower skirts of their mountains, they coalesced on either side into a single stupendous avalanche roaring into the valley—one from the east, one from the west —to meet in the middle. Rasping across the flat valley floor, they must have slowed their rush to some slight degree, but not so I could see it, and the front face of each cataract was still as high as a three-story wall when they came together. And when they did that, it made me remember once having seen two great mountain rams, in the season of rut, gallop at each other and butt their huge horned heads together with a shock that made my own teeth shake.

I would have expected to hear a similarly teeth-rattling crash when the two monster avalanches met head on, but their thunder climaxed instead with a sort of cosmically loud kissing noise. The Jin-sha River, on its way through this valley, ran along its eastern edge. So the landslide sluicing down from the east simply scooped up a considerable length of that river as it careered across it, and, as it continued on, must have churned that water into its forward content so that its front became a wall of sticky muck. When the two careening masses came together, then, it was with a loud, slapping, moist slurp!, suggesting that the avalanches were cemented there to be the valley’s new and higher floor for all time to come. Also, at the instant of their collision, the sun bounded into view beyond the eastern mountains, but the sky was so thick with dust that its disk was discolored. The sun came up as suddenly and as brassy of hue and as blurred around the rim as if it had been a cymbal thrown up there to ring the finale to all the commotion in the valley. And, while the trailing rubble skirts of the slides continued to sweep down from the heights, the noise did indeed die down, not all at once, but with the kind of wobbling, clashing, diminishing clangor that a cymbal makes as its blur slows to stillness.

In the sudden hush—it was not a total silence, for many boulders were still thudding and bouncing down from the heights, and trees still crunching and skidding down, and patches of turf still skittering down, and unidentifiable other things still caroming about in the distance—the first words I heard were the Orlok’s:

“Ride now, Captain Toba. Fetch our army.”

The captain went back the way we had come. Bayan leisurely took out from a purse the great gleaming device of gold and porcelain that was his teeth, and forced it into his mouth, and gnashed it a few times to settle its jaws to his own. Looking now a proper Orlok, ready for his triumphal parade, he strode off down the hill in the direction we were facing. When he dimmed into the cloud of dust, the rest of us followed after him. I did not know why we were doing that, unless to gloat on the completeness of our unusual victory. But there was nothing to be seen of it, or of anything really, in that dense and stifling pall. When we had gone only as far as the bottom of the hill, I had lost sight of my companions, and only heard Bayan’s muffled voice, off to my right somewhere, saying to somebody, “The troops will be disappointed when they get here. No battlefield loot to pick over.”

The enormous cloud of dust thrown up by the avalanches had, by the time the two masses met, entirely obscured our view of the valley and its ultimate devastation. So I cannot say that I actually witnessed the annihilation of something like a hundred thousand people. Nor, in all the noise, did I hear their last hopeless screams or the snapping of their limbs. But they were now gone, together with all the horses, weapons, their personal belongings and other equipment. The valley had been resurfaced, and the people had been wiped out as if they had been no bigger or more worth keeping than the crawling ants and beetles that had inhabited the old ground.