Unknown to him, in these years it took the depth, the strength, the patience, the melancholy, the virility of the North; took these never to be lost again.
In the twentieth winter of his life an avalanche engulfed the pastor's house, and the little church by which it stood, covering both beneath a mountain of earth and snow and rock and riven trees. Some of the timbers withstood the shock, and the roof remained standing, uncrushed, above their heads. The avalanche fell some little time after midnight: there were only present in the dwelling himself, the old man, and a serving woman.
The woman was killed on her bed by the fall of a beam upon her; he and the pastor still lived: lived in perpetual darkness without food or fuel, or any ray of light.
The wooden clock stood erect, uninjured; they could hear the hours go by in slow succession. The old man was peaceful and even cheerful; praising God often and praying that help might come to his beloved one. But his strength could not hold out against the icy cold, the long hunger, the dreadful blank around as of perpetual night. He died ere the first day had wholly gone by, at even-song; saying still that he was content, and still praising God who had rewarded his innocence with shame and recompensed his service with agony.
For two more days and nights Arslàn remained in his living tomb, enshrouded in eternal gloom, alone with the dead, stretching out his hands ever and again to meet that icy touch rather than be without companionship.
On the morning of the third day the people of the village, who had labored ceaselessly, reached him, and he was saved.
As soon as the spring broke he left the valley and passed over the mountains, seeking a new world.
His old familiar home had become hateful to him; he had no tie to it save two low graves, still snow-covered underneath a knot of tall stone-pines; the old Norse passion of wandering was in his veins as it had been in his mother's before him; he fiercely and mutely descried freedom, passion, knowledge, art, fame, as she had desired them, and he went: turning his face from that lowly green nest lying like a lark's between the hills.
He did not go as youth mostly goes, blind with a divine dream of triumph: he went, consciously, to a bitter combat as the sea-kings of old, whose blood ran in his veins, and whose strength was in his limbs, had gone to war, setting their prow hard against the sharp salt waves and in the teeth of an adverse wind.
He was not without money. The pastor, indeed, had died almost penniless; he had been always poor, and had given the little he possessed to those still poorer. But the richest landowner in the village, the largest possessor of flocks and herds, dying childless, had bequeathed his farm and cattle to Arslàn; having loved the lad's dead mother silently and vainly. The value of these realized by sale gave to Arslàn, when he became his own master, what, in that valley at least, was wealth; and he went without care for the future on this score into the world of men; his mind full of dreams and the beautiful myths of dead ages; his temper compounded of poetry and of coldness, of enthusiasm and of skepticism; his one passion a supreme ambition, pure as snow in its instinct, but half savage in its intensity.