A Winter's Love by L'Engle Madeleine;

Author:L'Engle, Madeleine;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

Four

They caught glimpses of the glacier from the little train that took them to it, but their first real view was from, the rocky cliff that loomed above it, hemming it in on one side as the forest hemmed it in on the other. The sight of the great, crumbled, jagged, turbulent sea of ice was like the slap of a wave of cold water against their chests, and they caught their breaths.

Kaarlo was familiar with petrified oceans like this, Emily thought; he was as at home on a glacier as a sailor at sea, more so, because many sailors cannot swim, and know the element of water only through the intermediary of their ship; but Kaarlo knew the mountains and their seas of ice directly through his body. It was an alien sight to Emily, this glacier, and an exhilarating one. She reached, unthinking, for Courtney’s arm at the same moment that she was wanting Abe to be there to share the experience of the day; and perhaps at the same moment he and Kaarlo were climbing over a sea of ice, and her heart froze with fear for them. For the first time she knew how Gertrude felt each time Kaarlo went up the mountains. Kaarlo’s father had been killed on Mont Blanc and this was something Gertrude could not forget each time Kaarlo went out, no matter how small a climb it might be. “I swore I’d never be an aviator’s wife,” she had once said angrily to Emily, “and now I’m a mountain guide’s mistress. How dumb can you get?”

They clambered down the snaky path that was cut in zigzags down the cliffside, and stood side by side on the surface of the frozen sea. Then they moved away slowly, each alone, even the children separate, no longer seeking contact, because here was a sea that did not encourage human communion; it was too isolated and too huge, and too demanding in itself.

The ice was churned green and yellow and colorless, and in places it was quite brown. Not until he had clambered over great frozen waves and come to one of the crevasses did Courtney see the icy blue colors he had anticipated. The crevasse was narrow but it went down so deep that it was impossible to see to the bottom of it.

The only accident in the mountains that winter had been on a glacier: a guide was taking a small party of German tourists for a simple climb, nothing dangerous, but one of the men would not stay with the others, and fell and was killed. It happened that Courtney had gone with Emily and Connie and Gertrude that evening to the Splendide for an apéritif, and they were sitting there quietly, he stirring extra suger into Connie’s lemonade, when the news came in that there had been an accident. Kaarlo was out that day with a party, and Gertrude went dead-white but did not say a word; and neither Courtney nor Emily

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