And so. . .as she completed her performance, put on her shoes, went off in the darkness, it appeared the sun would be coming up shortly . . .so many of the audience simply waited for the sunrise to start their trip home. . .the Eastern sky lightened. . .but the sun would not appear for more than an hour. . .it was the aurora borealis, or the northern lights, that were lighting up the sky, and which, even more than the Wonderlanders had planned, made their illusion a very much greater success than they had planned.
From inside the shade grove of their practice pond, the sky was not terribly visible, even in the daytime, so it is not hard to realize how much the northern lights looked brighter than the darkness of a grove of trees.
By the time the sun really did come up the pond had totally melted.
And the illusion was complete. . .where there had been ice skating, now was a lake. . .the lake they now call Lake Dimbovitsa. . .after the last of the Wonderlanders who skated their that night.
***
So many people came and went in so many directions that night and a period of the first few hours of the following morning, that it was impossible to follow any tracks a week later, when people began the realization that the Wonderlanders were not coming back.
Lots of things were done to find them, but nearly all had been well prepared for, and the addition of spring rains, a quick thaw, a lot of mud travelled by a lot of people, made it even more impossible a task to find someone who had already gone to great pains not to be.
Who, in a camp of gypsies might recognize that the hooks from which pots of stew were hanging looked something like skate blades? Who, in their right might thinks of skate blades being any other than in bright, shiny silver? These black sooty hooks were on all of these fires, all looked the same. . .just black sooty hooks.
There were some efforts to follow the major bands of gypsies for an extra year or two, but these were in such a small band, that anyone would know an entire band of ice-skaters could not hide within. It would have been just too obvious. No one considered that the whole band of dark-skinned gypsies might be ice-skaters. But they were.
***