If you should start from your home and travel southward, you would at first cross land after land where it grew warmer; but if you kept on, you would at last begin to recognize all that you had seen on your northward journey: life failing, colors fading, the living harmonies of the earth replaced by the discords of Nature’s lifeless forces: pinnacles of ice, deserts of snow. Again on those boundaries of desolation you would see the sign of the world’s youth—its evergreen: only that sign.
If, starting from your home for the third time, you could rise straight into the air, higher, higher, as though you were climbing the side of an aerial mountain, you would at last find that you had ascended the aerial mountain to a height where, were it a real mountain, it would be capped with snow, capped with perpetual snow. For all round the earth wherever its actual mountains are high enough, their summits pierce the level of eternal cold: above us everywhere lies the unseen land of eternal cold. And there again near those summits your eye, searching for some mitigation of the solitude, would come upon the evergreen.
Some time in the future, we do not know when, but some time the cold at the north will have moved so far southward; the cold at the south will have moved so far northward; the cold in the upper air will have moved so far downward, that the three will meet and when they meet there will be for the earth one whiteness, one silence—rest: all troubled or untroubled things will be at rest.
A GREAT time had passed, how great no one knew; there was none to measure it.
It was twilight and it was snowing. On a steep mountain’s side near its bald summit thousands of feet above the line that any other living thing had ever crossed, stood two glorious fir trees, strongest and last of their race. They had climbed out of the valley below to this height and had so rooted themselves in rock and soil that the wildest gales had never been able to dislodge them. Now the two occupied that beetling cliff as the final sentinels of Nature. They were like two soldiers stationed at the farthest outpost against the enemy and remaining faithful after all they stood for had perished.