“Sanna, day is breaking,” said the boy.

“Yes, Conrad,” answered the girl.

“After it grows just a bit brighter we shall go out of the cave and run down from the mountain.”

It grew brighter, no star was visible any longer, and all things stood out clear in the dawn.

“Well, then, let us go,” said the boy.

“Yes, let us go,” answered Sanna.

The children arose and tried their limbs which only now felt their tiredness.  Although they had not slept, the morning had reinvigorated them.  The boy slung the calfskin bag around his shoulder and fastened Sanna’s fur-jacket about her.  Then he led her out of the cave.

As they had believed it would be an easy matter to run down from the mountain they had not thought of eating and had not searched the bag, to see whether it contained any wheat-bread or other eatables.

The sky being clear, Conrad had wanted to look down from the mountain into the valleys in order to recognize the valley of Gschaid and descend to it.  But he saw no valleys whatever.  He seemed not to stand on any mountain from which one can look down, but in some strange, curious country in which there were only unknown objects.  Today they saw awful rocks stand up out of the snow at some distance which they had not seen the day before; they saw the glacier, they saw hummocks and slanting snow-fields, and behind these, either the sky or the blue peak of some very distant mountain above the edge of the snowy horizon.

At this moment the sun arose.

A gigantic, bloody red disk emerged above the white horizon and immediately the snow about the children blushed as if it had been strewn with millions of roses.  The knobs and pinnacles of the mountain cast very long and greenish shadows along the snow.

“Sanna, we shall go on here, until we come to the edge of the mountain and can look down,” said the boy.

They went farther into the snow.  In the clear night, it had become still drier and easily yielded to their steps.  They waded stoutly on.  Their limbs became even more elastic and strong as they proceeded, but they came to no edge and could not look down.  Snowfield succeeded snowfield, and at the end of each always shone the sky.

They continued nevertheless.

Before they knew it, they were on the glacier again.  They did not know how the ice had got there, but they felt the ground smooth underfoot, and although there were not such awful boulders as in the moraine where they had passed the night, yet they were aware of the glacier being underneath them, they saw the blocks growing ever larger and coming ever nearer, forcing them to clamber again.

Yet they kept on in the same direction.