Despite these small numbers, I had been shown Romansch science fiction novels published (with the help of state subsidies) in handsome hardback editions of five thousand. But I had never heard the language spoken, and now it was a pleasure to listen to it as I looked out the window and tried not to get impatient at the many stops. Just throw German and Italian in a blender, I decided, and you would have the sound of it exactly.

We passed under Flims, the big town of the valley, which was perched over us on a broad bench on the north slope. I had read that the entire bench was the remains of a single immense landslide. This landslide had been dated to about twenty thousand years before, after the most recent Ice Age glacier had retreated upvalley. It was the biggest identifiable landslide in all Switzerland, and clearly the Swiss were pleased to have been able to set an entire town on it.

An hour after passing under Flims we stopped in yet another tiny station, and this time everyone got off the train. I didn’t understand until a conductor came through and conveyed to me, in German I could barely understand, that I too had to get off. Some kind of problem, it was clear-Erdrutch, I heard him say, which sounded like earth rush. Another landslide!

The conductor nodded at my look of comprehension. He then seemed to be telling me that a postal bus would carry all passengers past the blockage to the village of Trun, where another train awaited us.

But I didn’t want to go as far as Trun, I told him awkwardly. I wanted to go to Danis, and then up the valley wall to Breil, where a cable car would take me up to the alps below Kistenpass.

The conductor nodded and led me off the train to a schedule posted on the station wall. Apparently I was in Tavanasa, right next to Danis, and a bus would be leaving here for Breil at noon.

While I was still deciphering all this the conductor got on one of the postal buses carrying the train’s passengers, and they all drove off.