g after other people.

Birkin went again to Gerald. He had loved him. And yet he felt chiefly
disgust at the inert body lying there. It was so inert, so coldly dead,
a carcase, Birkin's bowels seemed to turn to ice. He had to stand and
look at the frozen dead body that had been Gerald.

It was the frozen carcase of a dead male. Birkin remembered a rabbit
which he had once found frozen like a board on the snow. It had been
rigid like a dried board when he picked it up. And now this was Gerald,
stiff as a board, curled up as if for sleep, yet with the horrible
hardness somehow evident. It filled him with horror. The room must be
made warm, the body must be thawed. The limbs would break like glass or
like wood if they had to be straightened.

He reached and touched the dead face. And the sharp, heavy bruise of
ice bruised his living bowels. He wondered if he himself were freezing
too, freezing from the inside. In the short blond moustache the
life-breath was frozen into a block of ice, beneath the silent
nostrils. And this was Gerald!

Again he touched the sharp, almost glittering fair hair of the frozen
body. It was icy-cold, hair icy-cold, almost venomous. Birkin's heart
began to freeze. He had loved Gerald. Now he looked at the shapely,
strange-coloured face, with the small, fine, pinched nose and the manly
cheeks, saw it frozen like an ice-pebble--yet he had loved it. What was
one to think or feel? His brain was beginning to freeze, his blood was
turning to ice-water. So cold, so cold, a heavy, bruising cold pressing
on his arms from outside, and a heavier cold congealing within him, in
his heart and in his bowels.

He went over the snow slopes, to see where the death had been. At last
he came to the great shallow among the precipices and slopes, near the
summit of the pass. It was a grey day, the third day of greyness and
stillness. All was white, icy, pallid, save for the scoring of black
rocks that jutted like roots sometimes, and sometimes were in naked
faces. In the distance a slope sheered down from a peak, with many
black rock-slides.

It was like a shallow pot lying among the stone and snow of the upper
world. In this pot Gerald had gone to sleep. At the far end, the guides
had driven iron stakes deep into the snow-wall, so that, by means of
the great rope attached, they could haul themselves up the massive
snow-front, out on to the jagged summit of the pass, naked to heaven,
where the Marienhutte hid am