“He sends you his glove,” said Prince Prigio, “as a challenge to mortal combat, till death do you part.”
Then he dropped his own glove into the fiery lake.
“Does he?” yelled the Firedrake. “Just let me get at him!” and he scrambled out, all red-hot as he was.
“I’ll go and tell him you’re coming,” said the prince; and with two strides he was over the frozen mountain of the Remora.
CHAPTER X.—The Prince and the Remora
If he had been too warm before, the prince was too cold now. The hill of the Remora was one solid mass of frozen steel, and the cold rushed out of it like the breath of some icy beast, which indeed it was. All around were things like marble statues of men in armour: they were the dead bodies of the knights, horses and all, who had gone out of old to fight the Remora, and who had been frosted up by him. The prince felt his blood stand still, and he grew faint; but he took heart, for there was no time to waste. Yet he could nowhere see the Remora. “Hi!” shouted the prince. Then, from a narrow chink at the bottom of the smooth, black hill,—a chink no deeper than that under a door, but a mile wide,—stole out a hideous head!
It was as fiat as the head of a skate-fish, it was deathly pale, and two chill-blue eyes, dead-coloured like stones, looked out of it.