Now we must see what Kay was about.  He was not thinking about Gerda at all, least of all that she was just outside the Palace.

SEVENTH STORY

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE SNOW QUEEN’S PALACE AND AFTERWARDS

[Illustration:  The Snow Queen sat in the very middle of it when she sat at home.]

The Palace walls were made of drifted snow, and the windows and doors of the biting winds.  There were over a hundred rooms in it, shaped just as the snow had drifted.  The biggest one stretched for many miles.  They were all lighted by the strongest northern lights.  All the rooms were immensely big and empty, and glittering in their iciness.  There was never any gaiety in them; not even so much as a ball for the little bears, when the storms might have turned up as the orchestra, and the polar bears might have walked about on their hind legs and shown off their grand manners.  There was never even a little game-playing party, for such games as ‘touch last’ or ’the biter bit’—­no, not even a little gossip over the coffee cups for the white fox misses.  Immense, vast, and cold were the Snow Queen’s halls.  The northern lights came and went with such regularity that you could count the seconds between their coming and going.  In the midst of these never-ending snow-halls was a frozen lake.  It was broken up on the surface into a thousand bits, but each piece was so exactly like the others that the whole formed a perfect work of art.  The Snow Queen sat in the very middle of it when she sat at home.  She then said that she was sitting on ’The Mirror of Reason,’ and that it was the best and only one in the world.

Little Kay was blue with cold, nay, almost black; but he did not know it, for the Snow Queen had kissed away the icy shiverings, and his heart was little better than a lump of ice.  He went about dragging some sharp, flat pieces of ice, which he placed in all sorts of patterns, trying to make something out of them; just as when we at home have little tablets of wood, with which we make patterns, and call them a ‘Chinese puzzle.’

Kay’s patterns were most ingenious, because they were the ’Ice Puzzles of Reason.’  In his eyes they were first-rate and of the greatest importance:  this was because of the grain of glass still in his eye.  He made many patterns forming words, but he never could find out the right way to place them for one particular word, a word he was most anxious to make.  It was ‘Eternity.’  The Snow Queen had said to him that if he could find out this word he should be his own master, and she would give him the whole world and a new pair of skates.  But he could not discover it.

‘Now I am going to fly away to the warm countries,’ said the Snow Queen.  ‘I want to go and peep into the black caldrons!’ She meant the volcanoes Etna and Vesuvius by this.  ’I must whiten them a little; it does them good, and the lemons and the grapes too!’ And away she flew.