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The sun shows through the blizzard as a flat pale disc with no warmth in it. Turner bends the whole storm into one curve and hangs the sun inside it.

The column has been climbing for over a week, and the mountain people have learned its rhythm. They wait above the narrow places and roll boulders onto the baggage train, then vanish; the passes do the rest. It is late autumn of 218 BC, and snow is already lying on the heights. The strangest army Europe has seen is strung out along the track: Spanish infantry, Numidian horsemen, Balearic slingers, and 37 war elephants. They are walking to Italy the one way Rome never thought to guard. Rome planned for invasions by sea. Hannibal, 29 years old, is bringing his war overland, through the Alps, in winter's front hallway. He had been raised for exactly this. At nine, before an altar in Carthage, his father made him swear never to be a friend to Rome. The boy grew up in an army camp in Spain the way other children grow up in a trade. When the war came he moved first, out of Spain in spring with somewhere near 50,000 men. The mountains took a horrifying share: ambushes in the gorges, animals lost over the edges, cold, hunger, desertion. Polybius, who talked to survivors, says 20,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry walked down into Italy, roughly half of what had entered the foothills 15 days before. Which pass he used is still an open file. Polybius climbed the Alps himself to check the ground, and he interviewed men who had made the march. He also read the bronze tablet Hannibal left at a temple in southern Italy, listing his own troop numbers. None of it settles the route. Scholars have fought for centuries over half a dozen possible passes. At one high pass a team recently found a churned layer of soil, full of dung and dated close to the right decade. Thousands of animals had gone through. It is the kind of evidence the story deserves: not an inscription, not a sword, but a signature in mud. On the descent a landslide had cut the track. Livy tells the story every schoolchild got afterward. The engineers heaped timber on the rock and burned it, poured sour wine into the cracks, and broke the stone apart with fire and vinegar. Most of the elephants, astonishingly, survived the crossing. Italy's winter would kill nearly all of them within the year. It bought the most frightening 15 years in Roman history. Trebia, Trasimene, Cannae: at Cannae alone Rome lost more men in an afternoon than America lost in Vietnam, and it still refused to make peace. Hannibal stayed in Italy a decade and a half and never lost a pitched battle there. It did not matter. Turner saw the picture in a thunderstorm over Yorkshire. Watching the black mass wheel over the hills of Farnley in 1810, he shouted to his host's son that in two years he would see it again as Hannibal crossing the Alps. He kept the promise. The storm is bent into one enormous curling wave of weather, with the sun a pale coin behind it. The army is a struggle of small figures in the foreground, and tribesmen are stripping the stragglers. The hero is nowhere. One elephant appears far down the pass, the size of a fly against the light of Italy. When he exhibited it in 1812 he attached, for the first time, lines from his own gloomy poem, The Fallacies of Hope. Europe was watching another commander who had crossed the Alps to remake the world, and Turner's answer to the heroic portraits of Napoleon was a mountain range that does not care.