Translated by John Brownjohn.
In 1881, seven-year-old Katharina Ryhner is sent up the mountain to stay with her grandmother while her mother give birth to a sixth child. The little girl is worried. In her parents' inn in the valley the quarry workers talk of nothing but landslides, and it has not stopped raining for days. At school, the priest has started telling her the story of the Great Flood, but he did not end the tale. Katharina does not know whether Noah is saved or whether he will drown. And the rain keeps on falling.
When the baby is born and the time comes to leave her grandmother and go home, Katharina, filled with increasing and inexplicable sense of doom, refuses to leave. Soon afterwards she hears a deafening thunderclap. When she looks down the hill she sees a huge chunk of the mountainside hurtling down in the direction of her parents' inn.
This beautiful and melancholic novella set in the Glarner mountains Switzerland, is told from the viewpoint of a child whose innocence of the world is combined with an acute sense of the danger present beneath the harmony of nature. 'The Stone Flood' is a stark and tragically beautiful portrayal of the folly of adulthood, and the danger of refusing to make the more difficult choices which are open to us at each stage of our lives.
