red the rocks, so that
between the high summits there was nothing but an immense, white,
regular, dazzling and frozen surface. For three weeks Ulrich had not been
to the edge of the precipice from which he had looked down on the
village, and he wanted to go there before climbing the slopes which led
to Wildstrubel. Loeche was now also covered by the snow and the houses
could scarcely be distinguished, covered as they were by that white
cloak.

Then, turning to the right, he reached the Loemmern glacier. He went
along with a mountaineer's long strides, striking the snow, which was as
hard as a rock, with his iron-pointed stick, and with his piercing eyes he
looked for the little black, moving speck in the distance, on that
enormous, white expanse.

When he reached the end of the glacier he stopped and asked himself
whether the old man had taken that road, and then he began to walk along
the moraines with rapid and uneasy steps. The day was declining, the snow
was assuming a rosy tint, and a dry, frozen wind blew in rough gusts over
its crystal surface. Ulrich uttered a long, shrill, vibrating call. His
voice sped through the deathlike silence in which the mountains were
sleeping; it reached the distance, across profound and motionless waves
of glacial foam, like the cry of a bird across the waves of the sea. Then
it died away and nothing answered him.

He began to walk again. The sun had sunk yonder behind the mountain tops,
which were still purple with the reflection from the sky, but the depths
of the valley were becoming gray, and suddenly the young man felt
frightened. It seemed to him as if the silence, the cold, the solitude,
the winter death of these mountains were taking possession of him, were
going to stop and to freeze his blood, to make his limbs grow stiff and
to turn him into a motionless and frozen object, and he set off running,
fleeing toward his dwelling. The old man, he thought, would have returned
during his absence. He had taken another road; he would, no doubt, be
sitting before the fire, with a dead chamois at his feet. He soon came in
sight of the inn, but no smoke rose from it. Ulrich walked faster and
opened the door. Sam ran up to him to greet him, but Gaspard Hari had not
returned. Kunsi, in his alarm, turned round suddenly, as if he had
expected to find his comrade hidden in a corner. Then he relighted the
fire and made the soup, hoping every moment to see the old man come in.
From time to