d some other objects. They were gigantic fragments
lying in wild confusion and covered with snow sifting everywhere into
the chasms between them. The children almost touched them before seeing
them. They went up to them to examine what they were.

It was ice--nothing but ice.

There were snow-covered slabs on whose lateral edges the smooth green
ice became visible; there were hillocks that looked like heaped-up
foam, but whose inward-looking crevices had a dull sheen and lustre as
if bars and beams of gems had been flung pellmell. There rose rounded
hummocks that were entirely enveloped in snow, slabs and other forms
that stood inclined or in a perpendicular position, towering as high as
houses or the church of Gschaid. In some, cavities were hollowed out
through which one could insert an arm, a head, a body, a whole big wagon
full of hay. All these were jumbled together and tilted so that they
frequently formed roofs or eaves whose edges the snow overlaid and over
which it reached down like long white paws. Nay, even a monstrous black
boulder as large as a house lay stranded among the blocks of ice and
stood on end so that no snow could stick to its sides. And even larger
ones which one saw only later were fast in the ice and skirted the
glacier like a wall of debris.

"There must have been very much water here, because there is so much
ice," remarked Sanna.

"No, that did not come from any water," replied her brother, "that is
the ice of the mountain which is always on it, because that is the way
things are."

"Yes, Conrad," said Sanna.

"We have come to the ice now," said the boy; "we are on the mountain,
you know, Sanna, that one sees so white in the sunshine from our garden.
Now keep in mind what I shall tell you. Do you remember how often we
used to sit in the garden, in the afternoon, how beautiful it was, how
the bees hummed about us, how the linden-trees smelled sweet, and how
the sun shone down on us?"

"Yes, Conrad, I remember."

"And then we also used to see the mountain. We saw how blue it was, as
blue as the sky, we saw the snow that is up there even when we had
summer-weather, when it was hot and the grain ripened."

"Yes, Conrad."

"And below it where the snow stopped one sees all sorts of colors if one
looks close--green, blue, and whitish--that is the ice; but it only
looks so small from below, because it is so very far away. Father said
the ice will not go away before the end of the world