Page:Fidelia, (IA fidelia00balm).pdf/111

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THE VALLEY OF TITANS
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of ice and which laid the foundation of hummocks and hills which the later winds and waves built up and built up, little by little, storm by storm, until now they had made miniature mountains of spray and snow and ice all along the shore and out over the water in white, gleaming peninsulas and capes of frozen headlands and ice-cliffs.

Beyond, lay smooth, floating ice—the witness of cold weather with calm; still further out was water, the witness of wind again, when the further ice-field broke off and blew out.

There the floe was in sight with a white edge of cast-up, congealed spray. Beyond it was water once more; then ice; ice to the edge of the horizon, to the edge of the world, to the edge of creation, nothing but ice and sky. But in a moment there would be, also, the sun.

Fidelia was leaving the shore and was among the white, gleaming, miniature mountains. She was following the irregular way of their valleys. Sometimes a hill completely hid her; for a few moments, while she followed the path of some deeper canon, she kept out of his sight; but when she was a hundred yards off shore, she began climbing the ice slopes, appearing high above the distant, flat horizon, descending and climbing again.

Dave entered the dwarf valley in which her footprint, and his, became Titanic. If he did not look back but gazed only ahead at her and at the sky, he could lose all scale; they were the Titans, she and he, among the mountains with the sky and the sun.

She stood at the edge on the last high cliff where