s, something of a
sneer in the pitiless way in which he looked down on the infertile waste
around. Unaccountably two Greek words formed on my lips: Homer's Pontos
atrygetos--the barren sea. Half an hour later I was to realize the
significance of it.

I turned back to the road and north again. For another half mile the
fields continued on either side; but somehow they seemed to take on a
sinister look. There was more snow on them than I had found on the
level land further south; the snow lay more smoothly, again under
those "exfoliated" surface sheets which here, too, gave it an inhuman,
primeval look; in the higher sun the vast expanse looked, I suppose,
more blindingly white; and nowhere did buildings or thickets seem to
emerge. Yet, so long as the grade continued, the going was fair enough.

Then I came to the corner which marked half the distance, and there I
stopped. Right in front, where the trail had been and where a ditch
had divided off the marsh, a fortress of snow lay now: a seemingly
impregnable bulwark, six or seven feet high, with rounded top, fitting
descriptions which I had read of the underground bomb-proofs around
Belgian strongholds--those forts which were hammered to pieces by the
Germans in their first, heart-breaking forward surge in 1914. There
was not a wrinkle in this inverted bowl. There it lay, smooth and
slick--curled up in security, as it were, some twenty, thirty feet
across; and behind it others, and more of them to the right and to the
left. This had been a stretch, covered with brush and bush, willow and
poplar thickets; but my eye saw nothing except a mammiferous waste,
cruelly white, glittering in the heatless, chuckling sun, and scoffing
at me, the intruder. I stood up again and peered out. To the east it
seemed as if these buttes of snow were a trifle lower; but maybe the
ground underneath also sloped down. I wished I had travelled here more
often by daytime, so I might know. As it was, there was nothing to it; I
had to tackle the task. And we plunged in.

I had learned something from my first experience in the drift one mile
north of town, and I kept my horses well under control. Still, it was a
wild enough dash. Peter lost his footing two or three times and worked
himself into a mild panic. But Dan--I could not help admiring the way
in which, buried over his back in snow, he would slowly and deliberately
rear on his hindfeet and take his bound. For fully five minutes I never
saw