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from the warmer stream of water. The river crept in among them and licked at the icicles.
    The ground was made up of heather and tussocks of grass and, like everything else, shone silver with rime in the slanting sunlight. Unn jumped from tussock to tussock in this fairyland. Inside her satchel her books and sandwich box jumped up and down, too.
    The slope became steeper. At once the stream began making more noise, between protruding black river stones wearing shining crowns of ice. Unn was running herewithout permission. She thought: I didn’t really want to either. But the truth was that she wanted to more and more.
    Now she could distinctly hear the enticing roar below. Continually flowing away – and the more enticing it was, the more right it was.
    Her impetuous running had made her warm. Her breath lay in small clouds about her whenever she paused. Her thick coat was too stiff for hurrying in. Unn was warm right through, and her eyes were glittering. At intervals she paused on the tussocks and made lots of clouds with her warm, healthy breath.
    It became steeper, the river surged more loudly, but the roar of the falls still remained in the background, threatening and enticingly low. She thought as if in defiance: I didn’t want to do this!
    But she did. It had to do with Siss.
    It was the only thing that was right, even though it was disobedient and wrong. She could never turn back now. It had to do with Siss and all the good things she could glimpse from now on. If she were to turn away from this, if she were to retreat from the roar down there and return home empty-handed, she would feel a chasm of deprivation, a longing for something she would never find again.
    The roar was suddenly stronger. The river began to quicken its speed, flowing in yellow channels. Unn ran down the slope alongside, in a silvered confusion of heather and grass tussocks, an occasional tree among them. The roar was stronger, thick whorls of spray rose up abruptly in front of her – she was at the top of the falls.
    She stopped short as if about to fall over the edge, so abruptly did it appear.
    Two waves went through her: first the paralysing cold, then the reviving warmth – as happens on great occasions.
    Unn was there for the first time. No one had asked her to come here with them during the summer. Auntie had mentioned that there was a waterfall, no more. There had been no discussion of it until now, in the late autumn at school, after the ice palace had come and was worth seeing.
    And what was this?
    It must be the ice palace.
    The sun had suddenly disappeared. There was a ravine with steep sides. The sun would perhaps reach into it later, but now it was in ice-cold shadow. Unn looked down into an enchanted world of small pinnacles, gables, frosted domes, soft curves and confused tracery. All of it was ice, and the water spurted between, building it up continually. Branches of the waterfall had been diverted and rushed into new channels, creating new forms. Everything shone. The sun had not yet come, but it shone ice-blue and green of itself, and deathly cold. The waterfall plunged into the middle of it as if diving into a black cellar. Up on the edge of the rock the water spread out in stripes, the colour changing from black to green, from green to yellow and white, as the fall became wilder. A booming came from the cellar-hole where the water dashed itself into white foam against the stones on the bottom. Huge puffs of mist rose into the air.
    Unn began to shout for joy. It was drowned in the surge and din, just as her warm clouds of breath were swallowed up by the cold spume.
    The spume and the spray at each side did not stop for an instant, but went on building minutely and surely, though frenziedly. The water was taken out of its course to build with the help of the frost: larger, taller, alcoves and passagesand alleyways, and domes of ice above them; far more intricate and splendid than anything Unn had even seen before.
    She