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It was the hill down which they had travelled many thousands of times. Above, more snow-laden forest, and above that the steel of the glacier which rose till its awful limits plunged into the grey world of cloud.
At the bottom of the ravine the dark, turbulent brook rushed gurgling between the sharp outlines of its snow-laden banks. It was cool. The male-bird sat roosting with his eyes closed, his head sunk deep into his shoulders. Outwardly he bore a look of great humility, of languishing expectation, and a droll look of guiltiness wholly unbecoming to his natural severity. At dusk he grew restless.
Her heart ached when she saw him standing, brilliantly lovely as the glistening snow-laden branches above him, for it was plain from the confident set of his shoulders and the loose grip of his hand on his stick that he was unaware that any situation existed which was not easily negotiable.
"Reddy, are you perfectly sure we won't get lost in this place?" demanded Jessica at last. They had been walking along silently intent on their own thoughts. Perhaps it was the grandeur of the great snow-laden trees that oppressed them; perhaps the vast loneliness of the place, where nothing was stirring, not even a rabbit. "We're all right," returned Reddy. "My compass tells me.
That was the signal for us to turn abruptly to the left, entering the forest by a narrow bridle-path that twisted among the cedars. As if to look down in pity, the moon shone for a moment above the ragged edge of a storm cloud, and all the snow-laden evergreens stood out stately, shadowy and spectral, like mourners for the dead.
Meantime, while respectable Winnipeg lay snugly asleep under snow-covered roofs and smoking chimneys, while belated revellers and travellers were making their way through white, silent streets and under avenues of snow-laden trees to homes where reigned love and peace and virtue, in the north end and in the foreign colony the festivities in connection with Anka's wedding were drawing to a close in sordid drunken dance and song and in sanguinary fighting.
There was no mute, no crape, no parade nothing of that imposing array of hat-bands and horses by which man, even` in the face of the mighty mystery, seeks still to glorify the miserable conceits of life; but the silent snow-laden pine-trees, the few words of prayer read in the flickering light of the lantern, the hush of nature and of night, made accessions full as fitting, as all the muffled music and craped sorrow of church and city.
The road along which the travellers proceeded was desolate and dreary in the extreme. Already darkened by clouds and snow-drift, it was rendered still more gloomy by overhanging and snow-laden branches of stunted pines.
I pushed up through the snow-laden pines to the ridges where the snow lay in great wreaths and scallops, till I stood on a crest with a frozen world at my feet and above me a host of glittering stars. Once on a night of full moon I reached the glacier at the valley head, scrambled up the moraine to where the ice began, and peered fearfully into the spectral crevasses.
The cold, frosty, snow-laden season began; nothing but white forests, white fields, are to be seen in every quarter of the level Alföld, and as early as four o'clock in the afternoon the dark-grey, lilac-coloured atmosphere begins to envelope the horizon all round about, rising higher and higher every moment, till at last the very vault of heaven is reached, and it is night.
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