the day before; they saw the glacier, they saw hummocks and slanting
snow-fields, and behind these, either the sky or the blue peak of some
very distant mountain above the edge of the snowy horizon.

At this moment the sun arose.

A gigantic, bloody red disk emerged above the white horizon and
immediately the snow about the children blushed as if it had been strewn
with millions of roses. The knobs and pinnacles of the mountain cast
very long and greenish shadows along the snow.

"Sanna, we shall go on here, until we come to the edge of the mountain
and can look down," said the boy.

They went farther into the snow. In the clear night, it had become still
drier and easily yielded to their steps. They waded stoutly on. Their
limbs became even more elastic and strong as they proceeded, but they
came to no edge and could not look down. Snowfield succeeded snowfield,
and at the end of each always shone the sky.

They continued nevertheless.

Before they knew it, they were on the glacier again. They did not know
how the ice had got there, but they felt the ground smooth underfoot,
and although there were not such awful boulders as in the moraine where
they had passed the night, yet they were aware of the glacier being
underneath them, they saw the blocks growing ever larger and coming ever
nearer, forcing them to clamber again.

Yet they kept on in the same direction.

Again they were clambering up some boulders; again they stood on the
glacier. Only today, in the bright sunlight, could they see what it was
like. It was enormously large, and beyond it, again, black rocks soared
aloft. Wave heaved behind wave, as it were, the snowy ice was crushed,
raised up, swollen as if it pressed onward and were flowing toward the
children. In the white of it they perceived innumerable advancing wavy
blue lines. Between those regions where the icy masses rose up, as if
shattered against each other, there were lines like paths, and these
were strips of firm ice or places where the blocks of ice had not been
screwed up very much. The children followed these paths as they intended
to cross part of the glacier, at least, in order to get to the edge of
the mountain and at last have a glimpse down. They said not a word. The
girl followed in the footsteps of the boy. The place where they had
meant to cross grew ever broader, it seemed. Giving up their direction,
they began, to retreat. Where they could not walk they broke with their
han