Read The Ice Palace for Free Online Page B

room, there was a way out at the other end: green, dry ice, a fissure abandoned by the water.
    When she arrived inside the next one she caught her breath at what she saw: she was in the middle of a petrified forest. An ice forest.
    The water, which had spurted up here for a while, had fashioned stems and branches of ice, and small trees stuck up from the bottom among the large ones. There were things here, too, that could not be described as either the one or the other – but they belonged to such a place and one had to accept everything as it came. She stared wide-eyed into a strange fairy-tale. The water was roaring far away.
    The room was light. No sunshine – it was probably still behind the hill – but the daylight sidled in, glimmering curiously through the ice walls. It was dreadfully cold.
    But the cold was of no importance as long as she was there; that was how it should be, this was the home of the cold. Unn looked round-eyed at the forest, and here, too, she gave a faltering and tentative shout: ‘Hey!’
    There was no reply.
    She started in surprise. It didn’t answer!
    Everything was stone-hard ice. Everything was unusual. But it did not answer, and that was not right. She shuddered and felt herself to be in danger.
    The forest was hostile. The room was magnificent beyond belief, but it was hostile and it frightened her. She looked for a way out at once, before anything should happen. Forward or back meant nothing to her any longer; she had lost all sense of it.
    And she found another fissure to squeeze through. They seemed to open up for her wherever she went. When she was through she was met by a new kind of light that she was to recognize from her past life: it was ordinary daylight.
    She looked about her hastily, a little disappointed; it was the ordinary sky above her! No ceiling of ice but a cold blue winter sky reassuringly high up. She was in a round room with smooth walls of ice. The water had been here but had been channelled elsewhere afterwards.
    Unn did not dare to shout ‘Hey!’ here. The ice forest had put a stop to that, but she stood and tested her clouds of breath in this ordinary light. She felt colder and colder when she remembered to think about it. The warmth from her walk had been used up long ago; the warmth inside her was now in these small clouds of breath. She let them rise up in quick succession.
    She was about to go on but stopped abruptly. Someone had called ‘Hey!’ From
that
direction. She spun around and found no one. But she had not imagined it.
    She supposed that if the visitor did not call, then the room did so. She was not sure she liked it but answered with a soft ‘Hey!’ really no more than a whisper.
    But it made her feel better. She seemed to have done the right thing, so she took courage from it and looked around for a fissure so that she could go on at once. The roar of the falling water was loud and deep at this point; she was close to it without being able to see it. She must go on!
    Unn was shivering with cold now, but she did not know it, she was much too excited. There was the opening! As soon as she wanted one it was there.
    Through it quickly.
    But this was unexpected, too: she was standing in what looked like a room of tears.
    As soon as she stepped in she felt a trickling drop on the back of her neck. The opening she had come through was so low that she had had to bend double.
    It was a room of tears. The light in the glass walls was very weak, and the whole room seemed to trickle and weep with these falling drops in the half dark. Nothing had been built up there yet, the drops fell from the roof with a soft splash, down into each little pool of tears. It was all very sad.
    They fell into her coat and her woollen cap. It didn’t matter, but her heart was heavy as lead. It was weeping. What was it weeping for?
    It must stop!
    It did not stop. On the contrary, it seemed to increase. The water was coming in this direction in greater quantities, the