What might the end of the world look like, to people who inhabit high mountains, whose lives are governed by the dependable revolution of the seasons? Perhaps the sun might slip beneath a western ridge one evening, and not return in the morning. In the first half of the 20th century, that terrifying prospect represented a mild version of hell. Real hell would be knowing in advance that it was going to happen. And so, revisiting a theme that Charles Ferdinand Ramuz had explored many times before in his fiction-notably in a short story that he wrote in 1912, on the eve of another war-he...