In the enormous stillness that reigned about them, a silence in which no
snow-crystal seemed to move, the children heard three times the bursting
of the ice. That which seems the most rigid of all things and yet is
most flexible and alive, the glacier, had produced these sounds. Thrice
they heard behind them a crash, terrific as if the earth were rent
asunder,--a sound that ramified through the ice in all directions and
seemed to penetrate all its veins. The children remained sitting
open-eyed and looked out upon the stars.
Their eyes also were kept busy. As the children sat there, a pale light
began to blossom forth on the sky before them among the stars and
extended a flat arc through them. It had a greenish tinge which
gradually worked downward. But the arc became ever brighter until the
stars paled in it. It sent a luminosity also into other regions of the
heavens which shed greenish beams softly and actively among the stars.
Then, sheaves of vari-colored light stood in burning radiance on the
height of the arc like the spikes of a crown. Mildly it flowed through
the neighboring regions of the heavens, it flashed and showered softly,
and in gentle vibrations extended through vast spaces. Whether now the
electric matter of the atmosphere had become so tense by the unexampled
fall of snow that it resulted in this silent, splendid efflorescence of
light, or whether some other cause of unfathomable nature may be
assigned as reason for the phenomenon--however that be: gradually the
light grew weaker and weaker, first the sheaves died down, until by
unnoticeable degrees it grew ever less and there was nothing in the
heavens but the thousands upon thousands of simple stars.
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