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Sometimes it is so covered over with ice, that the travellers fall at every step; without mentioning those prodigious icicles hanging over head from the high trees, and threatening the passengers at every moment with their fall.
As we breathed, the vapor from our lips froze on our eyebrows, little white icicles formed on the mustaches and beards of the soldiers; and in order to melt them they warmed their chins by the bivouac fire, and as may be imagined a large number did not do this with impunity. Artillerymen held their hands to the horses' nostrils to get a little warmth from the strong breathing of these animals.
So Dick slept on, while the night deepened and the snow continued to drive against the window panes. Nor did he awake until morning, when the train stopped at a tiny station in the hills. There was no snow here, but the sun, just rising, threw no heat, and icicles were hanging from every cliff.
The tilts were built of slim logs, caulked with moss; and there was but one room and that a bare one with bunks at one end for the women and a cock-loft above for the men. The stove was kept at red heat, day and night, but, notwithstanding, there was half an inch of frost on the walls and great icicles under the bunks: extremes of temperature were thus to be found within a very narrow compass.
The second night's journey was like the first, for this desert never changed, its aspect, and on the following morning they halted beneath another pile of fantastic, sand-burnished rocks, from some of which hung salt like icicles. Here one of the bearers who had been denied water as a punishment for laziness, although in truth he was sick, began to suck the salt-icicles.
Each phase of the work which had been condemned by others took root and gathered strength, surviving like the slight branch of a tree which, flung upon the sand by a winter's storm, finds itself covered at morning with white and fantastic icicles, produced by the caprices of nightly frosts. So the sketch lived on and became the starting point of myriad branching moralizations.
He heard no more the cracking of branches beneath the weight of icicles and snow, he saw no more the spirits of departed men dancing wild dances on the skirts of the northern clouds, and the farther he travelled the milder grew the skies, the longer was the period of the sun's stay upon the earth, and the softer, though less brilliant, the light of the moon.
"You'll be there, Michael," he said, brushing the frost from his darkly whiskered face, and breaking the icicles hanging from his fur hood where it almost closed over his mouth. The man's grey eyes were smiling as they looked into the wide black eyes so mildly encouraging. "Sure, Father," came his prompt reply. "We got to be ther' anyway. That don't matter.
He was a mighty woodsman now, and could make a spray of chips fly around him as he hewed his way through the trunk of spruce-tree. Behind these leaders followed a pair of teamsters, guiding a rude sledge, loaded with food and the equipage of the camp, and drawn by two big, shaggy horses, blowing thick clouds of steam from their frosty nostrils. Tiny icicles hung from the hairs on their lips.
When he awoke it was a brilliant winter's morning. The sun was charioteering in highest heaven. The forest was white as though cotton-wool had blown through it. As far as eye could search, everything glittered, sheathed in a film of glass. Snow bulged from branches like pillows filled to bursting. Icicles hung down like fantastic swords.
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