Even though Conrad kept before his mind the fate of the huntsman who was frozen to death, and even though the children had almost emptied the bottle of black coffee—­which necessarily would bring on a corresponding relaxation afterwards, they would not have been able to conquer their desire for sleep, whose seductive sweetness outweighs all arguments against it, had not nature itself in all its grandeur assisted them and in its own depths awakened a force which was able to cope with sleep.

In the enormous stillness that reigned about them, a silence in which no snow-crystal seemed to move, the children heard three times the bursting of the ice.  That which seems the most rigid of all things and yet is most flexible and alive, the glacier, had produced these sounds.  Thrice they heard behind them a crash, terrific as if the earth were rent asunder,—­a sound that ramified through the ice in all directions and seemed to penetrate all its veins.  The children remained sitting open-eyed and looked out upon the stars.

Their eyes also were kept busy.  As the children sat there, a pale light began to blossom forth on the sky before them among the stars and extended a flat arc through them.  It had a greenish tinge which gradually worked downward.  But the arc became ever brighter until the stars paled in it.  It sent a luminosity also into other regions of the heavens which shed greenish beams softly and actively among the stars.  Then, sheaves of vari-colored light stood in burning radiance on the height of the arc like the spikes of a crown.  Mildly it flowed through the neighboring regions of the heavens, it flashed and showered softly, and in gentle vibrations extended through vast spaces.  Whether now the electric matter of the atmosphere had become so tense by the unexampled fall of snow that it resulted in this silent, splendid efflorescence of light, or whether some other cause of unfathomable nature may be assigned as reason for the phenomenon—­however that be:  gradually the light grew weaker and weaker, first the sheaves died down, until by unnoticeable degrees it grew ever less and there was nothing in the heavens but the thousands upon thousands of simple stars.

The children never exchanged a word, but remained sitting and gazed open-eyed into the heavens.

Nothing particular happened afterward.  The stars gleamed and shone and twinkled, only an occasional shooting star traversed them.

At last, after the stars had shone alone for a long time, and nothing had been seen of the moon, something else happened.  The sky began to grow brighter, slowly but recognizably brighter; its color became visible, the faintest stars disappeared and the others were not clustered so densely any longer.  Finally, also the bigger stars faded away, and the snow on the heights became more distinct.  Now, one region of the heavens grew yellow and a strip of cloud floating in it was inflamed to a glowing line.  All things became clearly visible and the remote snow-hills assumed sharp outlines.