The hilly fields, hardened by the frost, the bushes scattering ice—everything obstructs my way. I break through and follow her.
But she glides on before me, scarcely a foot above the ground, but farther, farther … over the broken earth, down the precipice … to the lake whose bluish surface of new ice melts in the distance into the afterglow.
Now she hangs over the bank like a cloud of smoke, and the wind that blows upon my back, raises the edges of her dress like triangular pennants. "Stay, Thea…. I cannot follow you across the lake! … The water will not upbear a mortal."…
But the rising wind pushes her irresistibly on.
Now I stand as the edge of the lake. The thin ice forces upward great hollow bubbles….
Will it suffer my groping feet? Will it break and whelm me in brackish water and morass?
There is no room for hesitation. For already the wind is sweeping her afar.
And I venture out upon the glassy floor which is no floor at all, but which a brief frost threw as a deceptive mirror across the deep.
It bears me up for five paces, for six, for ten. Then suddenly the cry of harps is in my ear and something like an earthquake quivers through my limbs. And this sound grows into a mighty crunching and waxes into thunder which sounds afar and returns from the distance in echoing detonation.
But at my left hand glitters a cleft which furrows the ice with manicoloured splinters and runs from me into the invisible.