As his strength ebbed Dick Herron’s energies concentrated more and more to his monomania of pursuit.  The round, full curves of his body had shrunken to angles, the fresh tints of his skin had turned to leather, the flesh of his cheeks had sunken, his teeth showed in the drawing back of his lips.  All these signs spoke of exhaustion and of ultimate collapse.  But as the case grew more desperate, he seemed to discover in some unsuspected quality of his spirit, or perhaps merely of his youth, a fitful and wonderful power.  He collapsed from weakness, to be sure; but in a moment his iron will, apparently angered to incandescence, got him to his feet and on his way with an excess of energy.  He helped the others.  He urged the dog.  And then slowly the fictitious vigour ran out.  The light, the red, terrible glare of madness, faded from his eye; it became glazed and lifeless; his shoulders dropped; his head hung; he fell.

Gradually in the transition period between the darkness of winter and the coming of spring the world took on an unearthly aspect.  It became an inferno of light without corresponding warmth, of blinding, flaring, intolerable light reflected from the snow.  It became luminous, as though the ghosts of the ancient days of incandescence had revisited the calendar.  It was raw, new, huge, uncouth, embryonic, adapted to the production of tremendous monsters, unfit for the habitation of tiny men with delicate physical and mental adjustments.  Only to the mind of a Caliban could it be other than terrifying.  Things grew to a size out of all reason.  The horizon was infinitely remote, lost in snow-mists, fearful with the large-blown mirages of little things.  Strange and indeterminate somethings menaced on all sides, menaced in greater and greater threat, until with actual proximity they mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind them as a blind to conceal their real identity such small matters as a stunted shrub, an exposed rock, the shadow of a wind-rift on the snow.  And low in the sky danced in unholy revel the suns, sometimes as many as eight of them, gazing with the abandoned red eyes of debauchees on the insignificant travellers groping feebly amid phantasmagoria.

The great light, the dazzle, the glitter, the incessant movement of the mirages, the shining of the mock suns, all these created an impression of heat, of light, of the pleasantness of a warmed land.  Yet still persisted, only modified by the sun, the cold of the northern winter.  And this denial of appearance sufficed to render unreal all the round globe, so that at any moment the eye anticipated its crumbling like a dust apple, with its cold, its vastness, its emptiness, its hunger, its indecently many suns, leaving the human soul in the abyss of space.  The North threw over them the power of her spell, so that to them the step from life to death seemed a short, an easy, a natural one to take.