Although they had not been asleep all night long, they felt refreshed by the morning. The lad slung the calfskin pouch over his shoulder and drew Sanna’s little fur jacket closer about her. Then he led her out of their stony retreat.

Since they thought they would only have to run down off the mountain they gave no thought to food and did not explore the pouch for bits of bread or anything else that might be left.

The sky being clear, Conrad thought he would look down into the valley, recognize Gschaid and climb down to it. But he saw no valley. They did not seem to be standing on a mountain from which one looks down, but rather on strange foreign ground full of unfamiliar sights. Today they saw towering up out of the snow great fearsome rocks in the distance, where they had not seen them the day before; they saw the glacier, snowy hills and slopes standing out boldly, and beyond them, sky or the blue peak of some distant mountain above the snow-line. At this moment the sun came up.

A gigantic blood-red disc climbed the heavens above the sky-line and at the same instant the snow all around flushed as though bestrewn with thousands of roses. Summits and horns cast long faint greenish shadows across the snowfields.

“Sanna, let’s keep on till we get to the side of the mountain and can look down,” said the lad.

They now started off through the snow. During the clear night it had become even drier and was easier to walk on. They ploughed along briskly, their limbs becoming supple and strong as they went. But they came to no mountain-side, and could not look down. Snowfield followed snowfield, and always, on the horizon of each, the sky.

Nevertheless they went on.

Then they found themselves on ice again. They did not know how the ice could have got there but they felt the hard glaze underfoot and, although there was no such intimidating wreckage of mighty fragments as on the edge of the moraine where they had spent the night, yet they saw they were treading on solid ice. Now and again they saw blocks of it, more and more of them, still nearer, and these forced them to do more clambering.

Still they kept on, in the same direction.

Now they surmounted monstrous debris; now found themselves again on the icefield. Today in the bright sun, they were able for the first time to see what it was like. In size it was stupendous, and beyond towered yet more sombre rocks; wave after wave heaved up, as it were, and the snow-covered ice, compressed and buckling, seemed to be pushing down upon the children and threatening to flow over their very bodies. In the whiteness they saw countless meandering bluish lines. Between where ice-blocks stood up as if hurled together, there were straight lines like paths, but they were white, with solid ice beneath, where the ice-blocks had not been forced up by intense pressure. The children kept on these paths since they wished to cross at least part of the glacier so as to reach the side of the mountain and be able to look down at last. They spoke not a word. The little one followed her brother. But again today, there was ice, nothing but ice. Where they had meant to cross it stretched on endlessly, farther and farther. Then they gave up and turned back. Where they could not set foot they crept forward on hands and knees along snow-banks that fell in before their very eyes and showed the dark blue of a crevasse—where just before all had been white; but paying no heed they struggled on till they had again come out of the ice.

“Sanna,” said the lad, “we’re not going out there on the ice again because we get nowhere on it. And since we can’t see down into our valley anyhow, let’s go down the mountain in a straight line. We are bound to come into some valley, and shall tell the people we are from Gschaid: they will send a guide with us to show us our way home.”

“Yes, Conrad,” said the little one.

They started down through the snow in the direction that seemed most promising. The young lad took his sister by the hand. However when they had worked down for a time the slopes changed level and began to rise. The children therefore altered their course and crept along a sort of gulley.