of yellow and red.  They could now see to larger distances, as the enormous and unceasing snowfall had abated somewhat and was only as heavy as on ordinary snowy days.  With the audacity of ignorance they clambered up on the ice in order to cross the interposing tongue of the glacier and to descend farther behind it.  They thrust their little bodies into every opening, they put their feet on every projection covered by a white snow-hood, whether ice or rock, they aided their progress with their hands, they crept where they could not walk, and with their light bodies worked themselves up until they had finally gained the top of the wall.

They had intended to climb down its other side.

There was no other side.

As far as the eyes of the children reached there was only ice.  Hummocks, slabs, and spires of ice rose about them, all covered with snow.  Instead of being a wall which one might surmount and which would be followed by an expanse of snow, as they had thought, new walls of ice lifted up out of the glacier, shattered and fissured and variegated with innumerable blue sinuous lines; and behind them were other walls of the same nature, and behind them others again, until the falling snow veiled the distance with its gray.

“Sanna, we cannot make our way here,” said the boy.  “No,” answered his sister.

“Then we will turn back and try to get down somewhere else.”

“Yes, Conrad.”

The children now tried to climb down from the ice-wall where they had clambered up, but they did not succeed.  There was ice all about them, as if they had mistaken the direction from which they had come.  They turned hither and thither and were not able to extricate themselves from the ice.  It was as if they were entangled in it.  At last, when the boy followed the direction they had, as he thought, come, they reached more scattered boulders, but they were also larger and more awe-inspiring, as is usually the case at the edge of the glacier.  Creeping and clambering, the children managed to issue from the ice.  At the rim of the glacier there were enormous boulders, piled in huge heaps, such as the children had never yet seen.  Many were covered all over with snow, others showed their slanting under-sides which were very smooth and finely polished as if they had been shoved along on them, many were inclined toward one another like huts and roofs, many lay upon one another like mighty clods.  Not far from where the children stood, several boulders were inclined together, and over them lay broad slabs like a roof.  The little house they thus formed was open in front, but protected in the rear and on both sides.  The interior was dry, as not a single snow-flake had drifted in.  The children were very glad that they were no longer in the ice, but stood on the ground again.

But meanwhile it had been growing dark.

“Sanna,” said the boy, “we shall not be able to go down today, because it has become night, and because we might fall or even drop into some pit.  We will go in under those stones where it is so dry and warm, and there we will wait.  The sun will soon rise again, and then we shall run down from the mountain.  Don’t cry, please, don’t cry, and I shall give you all the things to eat which grandmother has given us to take along.”