It took Ross a while to learn that the dirty-white walls of this tunnel
which were almost entirely opaque, with dark objects showing dimly
through them here and there, were of solid ice. A black wire was hooked
overhead and at regular intervals hung with lights which did nothing to
break the sensation of glacial cold about them.

Ross shuddered. Every breath he drew stung in his lungs; his bare
shoulders and arms and the exposed section of thigh between kilt and
boot were numb. He could only move on stiffly, pushed ahead by his
guards when he faltered. He guessed that were he to lose his footing
here and surrender to the cold, he would forfeit the battle entirely and
with it his life.

He had no way of measuring the length of the boring through the solid
ice, but they were at last fronted by another opening, a ragged one
which might have been hacked with an ax. They emerged from it into the
wildest scene Ross had ever seen. Of course, he was familiar with ice
and snow, but here was a world surrendered completely to the brutal
force of winter in a strange, abnormal way. It was a still, dead
white-gray world in which nothing moved save the wind which curled the
drifts.

His guards covered their eyes with the murky lenses they had worn pushed
up on their foreheads within the shelter, for above them sunlight
dazzled on the ice crest. Ross, his eyes smarting, kept his gaze
centered on his feet. He was given no time to look about. A rope was
produced, a loop of it flipped in a noose about his throat, and he was
towed along like a leashed dog. Before them was a path worn in the snow,
not only by the passing of booted feet, but with more deeply scored
marks as if heavy objects had been sledded there. Ross slipped and
stumbled in the ruts, fearing to fall lest he be dragged. The numbness
of his body reached into his head. He was dizzy, the world about him
misting over now and again with a haze which arose from the long
stretches of unbroken snow fields.

Tripping in a rut, he went down upon one knee, his flesh too numbed now
to feel the additional cold of the snow, snow so hard that its crust
delivered a knife's cut. Unemotionally, he watched a thin line of red
trickle in a sluggish drop or two down the blue skin of his leg. The
rope jerked him forward, and Ross scrambled awkwardly until one of his
captors hooked a fur mitten in his belt and heaved him to his feet once
more.

The purpose of that trek through the snow w