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was looking right down on it. She had to see it from below, and she began to climb down the steep, rimed slope at the side of the waterfall. She was completely absorbed by the palace, so stupendous did it appear to her.
    Only when she was down at the foot of it did she see it as a little girl on the ground would see it, and every scrap of guilty conscience vanished. She could not help thinking that nothing had been more right than to go there. The enormous ice palace proved to be seven times bigger and more extravagant from this angle.
    From here the ice walls seemed to touch the sky; they grew as she thought about them. She was intoxicated. The place was full of wings and turrets, how many it was impossible to say. The water had made it swell in all directions, and the main waterfall plunged down in the middle, keeping a space clear for itself.
    There were places that the water had abandoned, so that they were completed, shining and dry. Others were covered in spume and water drops, and trickling moisture that in a flash turned into blue-green ice.
    It was an enchanted palace. She must try to find a way in! It was bound to be full of curious passages and doorways – and she must get in. It looked so extraordinary that Unn forgot everything else as she stood in front of it. She was aware of nothing but her desire to enter.
    But finding the way was not so simple. Many places that looked like openings cheated her, but she did not give up, and so she found a fissure with water trickling through it, wide enough to squeeze herself through.
    Unn’s heart was thudding as she entered the first room. Green, with shafts of subdued light penetrating here and there; empty but for the biting cold. There was something sinister about the room.
    Without thinking she shouted ‘Hey!’ calling for someone. The emptiness had that effect; you had to shout in it. She did not know why. She knew there was nobody there.
    The reply came at once. ‘Hey!’ answered the room weakly.
    How she started!
    One might have expected the room to be as quiet as the tomb, but it was filled with an even roaring. The noise of the waterfall penetrated the mass of ice. The wild play of the water outside, dashing itself to foam against the stones on the bottom, was a low, dangerous churning in here.
    Unn stood for a little to let her fright ebb away. She did not know what she had called to and did not know what had answered her. It could not have been an ordinary echo.
    Perhaps the room was not so large after all? It felt large. She did not try to see whether she could get more answers, instead she looked for a way out, a means of getting further in. It did not occur to her for a moment to squeeze out into the daylight again.
    And she found a way as soon as she looked for it: a large fissure between polished columns of ice.
    She emerged into a room that was more like a passage but was a room all the same. She tested it with a half-whispered ‘Hey!’ and got a half-frightened ‘Hey!’ back again. She knew that rooms like this belonged in palaces – she was bewitched and ensnared, and let what had been lie behind her. At this moment she thought only of palaces.
    She did not shout ‘Siss!’ in the dark passage, she shouted ‘Hey!’ She did not think about Siss in this unexpectedenchantment; she thought about room upon room in a green ice palace and that she must enter each one of them.
    The cold was piercing, and she tried to see whether she could make big clouds with her breath, but the light was too dim. Here the noise of the waterfall came from below – but that couldn’t be right? Nothing was right in such a palace, but you seemed to accept it.
    She had to admit she was a little chilled and shivering, in spite of the warm coat Auntie had given her when the wintry weather had set in this autumn. But she would soon forget about it in the excitement of the next room, and the room was to be found, as surely as she was Unn.
    As might be expected in a narrow