ot to think, until the coming of morning.

The morning was much the same as the night, with only a patchy gray
light to tell him when the day had come. He moved out of the shelter
and walked, across shallow hills, rising in monotonous rhythm through a
bleak and barren landscape. The earth was a dull and frozen brown,
broken now and again by rock, or gnarled scrub, or nothing. The thin
snow blew over all, trailing and whirling about in long wisps like the
twisting hands of witches. He continued on for many hours, until the
wind relented just long enough for him to exhaust himself in flight.
He landed again, and found the earth covered intermittently with thin
patches of ice, sometimes deepening and joining together into shrunken,
unmoving streams, or withered oak leaves of many fingers.

He continued and night came again but he did not stop. He had eaten
what hard and knotted brush he could find, and there was now no lack of
moisture; and though it was his mind he feared, denying it had not yet
become unbearable. He rested a short time, went on the next day. And
the next, walking because he could not fly, into the growing cold, and
thicker snow, and ice that began to dominate the ground. Until he was
alone.

Time passed.

*

He had reached the farthest North. The world was ice, layered with
snow. The wind blew the white softness above into dunes, sometimes
foaming against islands of rock, huddled together in groups or
branching straight like disjointed coral reefs, while its gusting
blasts wrapped veils over all, swirling and howling in relentless
defiance. The day lasted but four short hours, then all was swathed in
darkness, so that the swirling sheets were blind and crashed over him
like spray of drowning surf on the deck of a floundering ship. He was
utterly alone.

Simin's strength was gone; he did not know what kept him going.
Perhaps because he had never known defeat..... But surely it was more.
Through the numb slowness of his near-frozen body a heart beat that
carried no blood. He was dangerously crippled by the cold.

He had passed wide cracks in the ice, chasms and fissures that he knew
must lead down: sometimes he could almost see, or sense, uncovered
earth or the edges of rock far below. And this was what he sought.
But always the feel of them was cold. He sought an entrance, which led
to a passage. He must find it soon or perish.

On the seventh day since entering the tundra, a