Again they were clambering up some boulders; again they stood on the glacier.  Only today, in the bright sunlight, could they see what it was like.  It was enormously large, and beyond it, again, black rocks soared aloft.  Wave heaved behind wave, as it were, the snowy ice was crushed, raised up, swollen as if it pressed onward and were flowing toward the children.  In the white of it they perceived innumerable advancing wavy blue lines.  Between those regions where the icy masses rose up, as if shattered against each other, there were lines like paths, and these were strips of firm ice or places where the blocks of ice had not been screwed up very much.  The children followed these paths as they intended to cross part of the glacier, at least, in order to get to the edge of the mountain and at last have a glimpse down.  They said not a word.  The girl followed in the footsteps of the boy.  The place where they had meant to cross grew ever broader, it seemed.  Giving up their direction, they began, to retreat.  Where they could not walk they broke with their hands through the masses of snow which often gave way before their eyes, revealing the intense blue of a crevasse where all had been pure white before.  But they did not mind this and labored on until they again emerged from the ice somewhere.

“Sanna,” said the boy, “we shall not go into the ice again at all, because we cannot make our way in it.  And because we cannot look down into our valley, anyway, we want to go down from the mountain in a straight line.  We must come into some valley, and there we shall tell people that we are from Gschaid and they will show us the way home.”

“Yes, Conrad,” said the girl.

So they began to descend on the snow in the direction which its slope offered them.  The boy led the little girl by her hand.  However, after having descended some distance, the slope no longer followed that direction and the snowfield rose again.  The children, therefore, changed their direction and descended toward a shallow basin.  But there they struck ice again.  So they climbed up along the side of the basin in order to seek a way down in some other direction.  A slope led them downward, but that gradually became so steep that they could scarcely keep a footing and feared lest they should slide down.  So they retraced their steps upward to find some other way down.  After having clambered up the snowfield a long time and then continuing along an even ridge, they found it to be as before:  either the snow sloped so steeply that they would have fallen, or it ascended so that they feared it would lead to the very peak of the mountain.  And thus it continued to be.

Then they had the idea of finding the direction from which they had come and of descending to the red post.  As it is not snowing and the sky is bright, thought the boy, they should be able, after all, to see the spot where the post ought to be, and to descend down from it to Gschaid.