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.

“There must have been very much water here, because there is so much ice,” remarked Sanna.

“No, that did not come from any water,” replied her brother, “that is the ice of the mountain which is always on it, because that is the way things are.”

“Yes, Conrad,” said Sanna.

“We have come to the ice now,” said the boy; “we are on the mountain, you know, Sanna, that one sees so white in the sunshine from our garden.  Now keep in mind what I shall tell you.  Do you remember how often we used to sit in the garden, in the afternoon, how beautiful it was, how the bees hummed about us, how the linden-trees smelled sweet, and how the sun shone down on us?”

“Yes, Conrad, I remember.”

“And then we also used to see the mountain.  We saw how blue it was, as blue as the sky, we saw the snow that is up there even when we had summer-weather, when it was hot and the grain ripened.”