The Ice Palace Read Online Free PDF Page B

understood.
    Her body quivered a little as she lay there; it looked as if she were lying in the clear water. Unn felt a fleeting dizziness and then realized afresh that she was lying safely on top of thick, steel-hard ice.
    It was uncomfortable looking at the sheer drop all the same. It meant certain death for anyone unable to swim. Unn could swim now, but there had been a time when she could not, and one day she had gone over just such a fall. She had been wading – when suddenly there was nothing beneath her foot. She went rigid, knowing that she was just about to – but then a rough hand had snatched her back on to safe ground, back to her noisy companions.
    Unn did not finish her train of thought about the horrid drop – a streak of light came from the darkness and up towards her: a fish moving as fast as an arrow, as if making straight for her eyes. She shrank aside, forgetting that there was ice between them. There was a stripe of grey-green back, then a jerk to one side and the flick of a glassy eye looking to see what she was.
    That was all, down again into the depths.
    And she knew very well what the little fish had wanted. Now he was down there already, telling the others, she imagined. In a way she liked it.
    But the inquisitive fish had cut across the bond that kept her tied to the spot. She was cold, too. She got up and began half running, sliding on the slippery ice. Some of the time she was on land, running quickly across headlands that jutted out into the lake, then out on the ice again. It made her warm, and it was fun.
    She did this for a long time; it was some distance to the outlet. But at last she arrived.
    She neither saw nor heard the waterfall. It was lower down. Here there was merely a whisper of water as it travelled downwards, and up at the outlet it was quite still and noiseless.
    This was the outlet of the great lake: a placid sliding of water from under the edge of the ice, so smooth that it was scarcely possible to see it. But a veil of vapour rose up from it in the cold. She was not conscious that she was standing looking at it. It was like being in a good dream. A good dream could be made out of so simple a thing. She felt no pangs of conscience because she was out on a walk without permission, and it would perhaps be difficult to find excuses for it. The placid water flowing away from the ice filled her with quiet joy.
    She would probably lose her hold and fall down into a hollow where the shadows were, this time, too, but it was a good moment and the other was chased away again by the sight that streamed towards her: the great river coming noiseless and clear from under the ice, flowing through her and lifting her up and saying something to her which was just what she needed.
    They were so still, she and the water, that now she thought she heard the waterfall, the distant roar where thissliding water threw itself over the precipice. You were not supposed to be able to hear the falls from here. She knew that from school. Now she could just hear it.
    That was where she was going. And she would
not
think about the other. She would be free of it today!
    All of them would be going down there on the school outing. The roar came like a faint echo through the frosty air, and really she should not have been hearing it.
    Supple and black and without a sound the lake slid forward from under the polished edge of the ice, new and clean all the time and as placid as if sliding in a dream.
    The distant tremor of the falls reminded her of where she was going. She awoke. She would have liked to tell somebody what she was feeling now – but she would never manage it, she knew.
    She realized how cold she was as soon as she stood still. The frost bored through her clothes. She began running to get warm.
    Just below the outlet the ground began to slope a little. The noiseless water began to whisper. The sloping river banks were a tracery of curious ice formations, after all the frosty weather and the spray