He lighted his stub of a pipe, and we started on again. The track of the she-wolf now led up a wooded slope so steep that we were obliged many times to dismount and lead our horses by the bridle.
"There it goes to the right," said Sperver; "in this direction the mountains go up like the side of a house. One of us may have to lead both horses while the other scrambles along after the trail, and as the devil will have it, it's getting so dark we can't see anything much longer."
The landscape was at this point assuming a grander aspect. Enormous boulders, covered with icicles, raised one beyond another their angular peaks, like breakers in a sea of snow.
There is nothing that imparts a more melancholy sense to the beholder than a winter scene among these mountains. The irregular line of crests, the dark ravines, the denuded trees and bushes sparkling with a tracery of hoar frost, all assume before your eyes a look of indescribable desolation and still sadness; and the silence, so profound that you can hear a dead leaf rustle on the snow-crust, or a pine-needle swirl from its branch,—this silence oppresses you; it forces upon you the realization of man's littleness in the scale of Nature's vast economy.
Sometimes we felt a need of speaking, if only to break the stillness:
"Ah, we are getting nearer the end of this business! How beastly cold it is! Lieverlé, what have you got there?" or some like insignificant phrase.
Unfortunately, our horses were beginning to tire; they sank up to their bellies in the snow, and no longer whinnied as they did on setting out. The inextricable defiles of the Black Forest stretched out indefinitely. The old woman loved these solitudes; here she had passed around a deserted charcoal-burner's hut; further on she had torn up the tender roots which overspread the surface of the rocks; and here again she had sat down at the foot of a tree to rest, and that recently,—at most two hours before, for the marks in the snow were fresh. At sight of this, our hopes and enthusiasm were redoubled; but the daylight was fast fading out. Strangely enough, ever since our departure from Nideck, we had met neither woodcutters, charcoal-burners, nor log-haulers; the solitude was as complete as in the Siberian steppes. At five o'clock the night had so far closed in that Sperver halted and said to me:
"Gaston, we have started a couple of hours too late. The Plague has got too long a start of us. In ten minutes the woods will be as dark as an oven. Our best plan will be to reach the Roche Creuse, twenty minutes from here, light a good fire, and eat our provisions and empty our goat-skins. When the moon comes up we will take up the trail again, and if the old hag is not the devil himself, ten to one we shall come upon her frozen stiff at the foot of some tree, for no human creature could live through such a tramp in such weather as this. Sebalt himself, who is the best walker in all the Black Forest, could not have stood it. What do you say, my boy?"
"I should be mad to think otherwise, and, moreover, I am perishing with hunger!"
"Well, let's be off!"