Below a sharp ledge of grey and black rock, swept naked by the winds, the drifted snow fell away in a steep slope, and then rounded off into the aching whiteness of the levels. The pale sun glared icily from the whitish sky, calling forth here and there a thin and steel-sharp glint of bitter radiance upon the dead-white immensity of the snow. The wind, which for weeks had scourged the frozen world, had fallen to the stillness of death; and now, in the grip of the immeasurable cold, the gaunt, solitary fir-trees, towering darkly at wide intervals above the waste, cracked like rifle-shots under the fierce tension of their fibres.
But in the cave beneath the ledge it was not cold. Through the curtain of drifted snow, seven or eight feet in thickness, which covered the narrow entrance, the bitterness of the frost could not penetrate. The snow-curtain was supported by the feathery branches of a young fir sapling, which kept the snow firmly in place yet so light and full of air-spaces that its soft shield was a
