But what could he have shouted? There were no words to describe what he was seeing. His brain tried to understand, but it was beyond a ski patroller.

And even before his instinct kicked in, the shapes in the ground had reached them, and the earth was beginning to shake like a gold-prospector’s sieve.

The screaming started at once. From the pylon icicles began to fall and as he watched a woman looking up at the shaking wire was speared through the eye, falling to the ground as a jet of blood spurted from the burst white globe.

The snow was opening below them like mouths. But this was no quake. There were forms in the snow. Snaking forms that were ripping the earth open and shaking the rock to the core. The chairs on the cable were starting to bounce and swing and as he stood immobile with terror in the chaos, a pylon creaked and fell in a lazy arc like a pine being felled.

Four people took it, the head of one man split like a soft fruit, the other three crushed in a tangle of limbs and metal resembling a child’s puzzle. But the chairs that held screaming passengers plummeted to the ground in a less complex mess of broken limbs and smashed bodies. It was easy to tell human from steel. Bones protruded from the shiny material of cheerful ski-suits, and the snow was host to the blackness of their occupants’ blood.

From the snaking white ground a boulder burst through and split like a loaf, its huge weight dragging across the bodies of two fallen figures as gravity tried to pull it back into the splitting earth. Baz could just make out the ripped, screaming face of Del Parkinson as it was pounded and mashed by the rock. Rock that seemed to have more life than the momentum of a quake would grant.

It was almost comical the way the ground was swallowing up the skiers. Arms held high as they fell in to the crack made by … those snaking things. What the fuck were those snaking things?

He was a spectator. Pasqual moved almost in slow motion, but then everything had slowed down to dream-pace to Baz, and he watched his screaming boss turn and try and run uphill. The shapes beneath the ground heaved and twisted and she stumbled, panting into a crevice. The gap opened and closed like a mouth and her leg was snapped from its thigh with a thick sound.

As she screamed, a deep and bellowing wail that was from the pit of her stomach rather than her throat, Baz opened his mouth and vomited. He straightened up, and without a command from his conscious mind his skis started off to the left of the moving earth, crashing him through the orange barricade to the safety of the unpisted slopes.