Summary

It is early Christmas morning, and an unknown child and adult are talking. The adult tells the child about another young person who, long ago, was lost in the snow and found their way to the gates of the underworld. The child listening to the story asks a number of questions which lead the teller of the story into a series of tangents concerning the stories of Kepler, who discovered the symmetry of snowflakes, of Bacon, who caught cold while attempting to discover if extreme cold could preserve meat, and of Descartes, who loved the cold so much that he moved to a snowy country and died of pneumonia. The child in the story meets the imposing god of the underworld. The child’s body heat begins melting the icy antechamber, and the god desperately demands that they stop.

Sophia heard the church...