'Do you not see that God is powerless here?' old Agnete said. 'Here there is nothing but an empty, barren waste.'
They went higher and higher towards the snow mountains. The moss spread itself softly over the stones; the Alpine herbs, with their velvety leaves, grew along the pathway; the mountain, with its rifts and precipices, its glaciers and snow-drifts, towered above them, weighing them down. Then the monk discovered old Agnete's hut, right below the glacier.
'Oh,' he said, 'is it there you live? Then you are not alone there; you have company enough. Only look!'
The monk put his thumb and first finger together, held them before old Agnete's left eye, and bade her look through them towards the mountain. But old Agnete shuddered and closed her eyes.
'If there is anything to see up there, then I will not look on any account,' she said. 'The Lord preserve us! it is bad enough without that.'
'Good-bye, then,' said the monk; 'it is not certain that you will be permitted to see such a thing a second time.'
Old Agnete grew curious; she opened her eyes and looked towards the glacier. At first she saw nothing remarkable, but soon she began to discern things moving about. What she had taken to be mist and vapour, or bluish-white shadows on the ice, were multitudes of doomed souls, tormented in the eternal cold.
Poor old Agnete trembled like an aspen leaf. Everything was just as she had heard it described in days gone by. The dead wandered about there in endless anguish and pain. Most of them were shrouded in something long and white, but all had their faces and their hands bared.
They could not be counted, there was such a multitude. The longer she looked, the more there appeared. Some walked proud and erect, others seemed to dance over the glacier; but she saw that they all cut their feet on the sharp and jagged edges of the ice.