The misty sea rose higher and higher; slowly, noiselessly, but steadily, one peak after another vanished beneath the gray, mysterious flood, which, like a deluge, swallowed up everything belonging to earth. The ice-pyramid of the Wolkenstein alone still stood forth, but its gleaming splendour had vanished with the vanished sunlight.
The solitary dreamer suddenly shuddered as if from the chill of an icy breath. He looked up; the blue above him had faded: he saw only white mist, which began to veil everything near at hand.
Ernst had been abundantly warned by the guides: he knew this sign; with danger the tension of his nerves returned; it was high time to retrace his steps. He began the descent, slowly, cautiously, testing every step as he had done in climbing up, but the mist barred his way everywhere and chilled him to the bone. Nevertheless, he pursued his downward path steadily, the traces of his ascent in the snow guiding him; at last, however, he was forced to search for them, and more than once he lost them. The effects of his over-exertion began also to assert themselves.
His breath came short and in gasps, the moisture stood out upon his forehead, and his sight grew uncertain. Conscious of this, he roused himself to greater efforts. He had challenged the danger, he would not succumb to it, the old nurse's tale should not come true, and his force of will was again victorious. He traversed the terrible path for the second time, and panting, gasping, half frozen, half dead from fatigue, he finally reached the foot of the pyramid, and stood upon the glacier summit of the cliff.
The hardest part of his task was over. True, there was still the sheer descent of the cliff to achieve, but steps had been hewn in the ice by the ascending party, and ropes had been left at the worst places to help in the descent. Ernst knew that he should find these aids; in spite of the fog, they would guide him to the snow-barrow, where his companions awaited him.
Then forth from the mist it hovered white and glistening, like fluttering veils softly touching cheek and brow in a gentle caress,--the snow had begun to fall. And in a few minutes the caressing touch was transformed to an oppressive, stifling embrace which it was vain to try to escape. Ernst staggered forward, then turned back, but the icy arms were everywhere: they robbed him of breath and froze the blood in his veins. One short, desperate struggle, and they held him in an indissoluble clasp,--he sank on the ground.
But with the struggle the distress too ceased. How delicious to fall asleep thus, so mortally weary that dream and reality mingled and melted into each other! Again he was standing on the summit in the sunlight, beholding the palace of ice in all its enchanted splendour, and gazing into the unveiled countenance of the Alpine Fay, whose pallid beauty no mortal might look upon and live. Yet her face was not that of a stranger. He knew those features, and the fathomless blue of the eyes that beamed and smiled upon him as never before. The image of the woman whom he had loved so wildly, so inexpressibly, did not leave him even upon the threshold of death, but stole softly upon the last gleams of his consciousness.
Then the sea of mist slowly rose higher and higher until all else was overwhelmed; the beloved face alone still showed faint and dreamlike through the gray veil, till finally it too faded, and the dreamer was borne onward by this sea of mist stretching endless and shoreless out into the immeasurable distance,--on into eternity.