They went on, had to enter in between the rocks and push on at their base. The rocks would let them escape neither to left nor right and led them on in a narrow path. After a while the children lost sight of them. They got away from the rocks as unexpectedly as they had got among them. Again, nothing surrounded them but white, no more dark forms interposed. They moved in what seemed a great brightness and yet could not see three feet ahead, everything being, as it were, enveloped in a white darkness, and as there were no shadows no opinion about the size of objects was possible. The children did not know whether they were to descend or ascend until some steep slope compelled their feet to climb.
"My eyes smart," said Sanna.
"Don't look on the snow," answered the boy, "but into the clouds. Mine have hurt a long time already; but it does not matter, because I must watch our way. But don't be afraid, I shall lead you safely down to Gschaid."
"Yes, Conrad."
They went on; but wheresoever they turned, whichever way they turned, there never showed a chance to descend. On either side steep acclivities hemmed them in, and also made them constantly ascend. Whenever they turned downward the slopes proved so precipitous that they were compelled to retreat. Frequently they met obstacles and often had to avoid steep slopes.
They began to notice that whenever their feet sank in through the new snow they no longer felt the rocky soil underneath but something else which seemed like older, frozen snow; but still they pushed onward and marched fast and perseveringly. Whenever they made a halt everything was still, unspeakably still. When they resumed their march they heard the shuffling of their feet and nothing else; for the veils of heaven descended without a sound, and so abundantly that one might have seen the snow grow. The children themselves were covered with it so that they did not contrast with the general whiteness and would have lost each other from sight had they been separated but a few feet.
A comfort it was that the snow was as dry as sand so that it did not adhere to their boots and stockings or cling and wet them.
At last they approached some other objects. They were gigantic fragments lying in wild confusion and covered with snow sifting everywhere into the chasms between them. The children almost touched them before seeing them. They went up to them to examine what they were.
It was ice—nothing but ice.
There were snow-covered slabs on whose lateral edges the smooth green ice became visible; there were hillocks that looked like heaped-up foam, but whose inward-looking crevices had a dull sheen and lustre as if bars and beams of gems had been flung pellmell. There rose rounded hummocks that were entirely enveloped in snow, slabs and other forms that stood inclined or in a perpendicular position, towering as high as houses or the church of Gschaid. In some, cavities were hollowed out through which one could insert an arm, a head, a body, a whole big wagon full of hay. All these were jumbled together and tilted so that they frequently formed roofs or eaves whose edges the snow overlaid and over which it reached down like long white paws. Nay, even a monstrous black boulder as large as a house lay stranded among the blocks of ice and stood on end so that no snow could stick to its sides. And even larger ones which one saw only later were fast in the ice and skirted the glacier like a wall of debris.