They had for some time laboured upward and onward through the snow--which
was now above their knees in the track, and of unknown depth
elsewhere--and they were still labouring upward and onward through the
most frightful part of that tremendous desolation, when snow begin to
fall. At first, but a few flakes descended slowly and steadily. After a
little while the fall grew much denser, and suddenly it began without
apparent cause to whirl itself into spiral shapes. Instantly ensuing
upon this last change, an icy blast came roaring at them, and every sound
and force imprisoned until now was let loose.
One of the dismal galleries through which the road is carried at that
perilous point, a cave eked out by arches of great strength, was near at
hand. They struggled into it, and the storm raged wildly. The noise of
the wind, the noise of the water, the thundering down of displaced masses
of rock and snow, the awful voices with which not only that gorge but
every gorge in the whole monstrous range seemed to be suddenly endowed,
the darkness as of night, the violent revolving of the snow which beat
and broke it into spray and blinded them, the madness of everything
around insatiate for destruction, the rapid substitution of furious
violence for unnatural calm, and hosts of appalling sounds for silence:
these were things, on the edge of a deep abyss, to chill the blood,
though the fierce wind, made actually solid by ice and snow, had failed
to chill it.
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