hour longer how can one pause even to eat or drink?
there is no hunger in the kingdom of night, no thirst, no fatigue! and
this is a neck to neck race with the moon.

Ah Dondersteen! but thou art beaten, fair moon! Let the mists embrace
thee now! sink! fall! die as thou list, there is the tower of St. Bavon!
and we defy the darkness now!

Here it comes creeping like a furtive and stealthy creature wiping out
with thick black cloth here a star and there the tip of a tall poplar
tree, there a shrub, there a clump of grass! Take care, traveller, take
care! that was not just the shadow from the bank, it was a bunch of
reeds that entangle the feet and bring the skater down on to his face
and will drag him, if he be not swift and alert, right under, into the
water under the ice.

Take care! there is danger everywhere now in this inky blackness! danger
on the ice, and upon the bank, danger in the shadows that are less dark
than the night!

Darker and darker still, until it seemed as if the night's brush could
not hold a more dense hue. The night--angered that she hath been so long
defied--has overtaken the flying skater at last. She grips him, she
holds him, he dare not advance, he will not retreat. Haarlem is there
not one whole league away and he cannot move from where he is, in the
midst of the Meer, on her icy bosom, with shadows as tangible as human
bodies hemming him in on every side.

Haarlem is there! the last kiss of the moon before she fell into that
bed of mist, was for St. Bavon's tower, which then seemed so near. Since
then the night had wiped out the tower, and the pointed gables which
cluster around, and the solitary skater is a prisoner in the fastnesses
of the night.

CHAPTER XX

BACK AGAIN IN HAARLEM

They were terribly weary hours, these last two which the soldier of
fortune, the hardened campaigner had to kill before the first streak of
pallid, silvery dawn would break over the horizon beyond the Zuyder Zee.

Until then it meant the keeping on the move, ceaselessly, aimlessly, in
order to prevent the frost from biting the face and limbs, it meant
wearily waiting in incessant, nerve-racking movement for every quarter
of an hour tolled by the unseen cathedral clock; it meant counting these
and the intervening minutes which crawled along on the leaden stilts of
time, until the head began to buzz and the brain to ache with the
intensity of monotony and of fatigue. It meant the steeling of iro