"I held her convulsively. It happened in an instant, before one could
leap aside. The bed of snow on which we were standing broke down into
the crevasse it had bridged, and let us through to the depths.

"Will you believe what follows? Pinch your nose and open your mouth. You
shall take the whole draught at a breath. _The ice at the point where we
entered was five hundred feet thick; and we fell to the very bottom of
it._

"Ha! ha! Is it difficult to swallow? But it is true--it is quite true.
Here I sit, sound and safe, and eminently sane, and that after a fall of
five hundred feet.

"Now, listen.

"We went down, welded together, with a rush and a buzz like a
cannon-ball. Thoughts? Ah! my friend, I had none. Who can think even
in a high wind? And here the wind of our going would have brained an ox.
Only one desperate instinct I had, one little forlorn remnant of
humanity--to shield the love of my heart. So my arms never left her; and
we fell together. I dreaded nothing, feared nothing, foresaw no terror
in the inevitable mangling crash of the end. For time, that is necessary
to emotion, was annihilated. We had outstripped it, and left sense and
reason sluggishly following in our wake.

"Sense, yes; but not altogether sensation. Flashingly I was conscious
here of incredibly swift transitions, from cold to deeper wells of frost;
thence down through a stratum of death and negation, between mere blind
walls of frigid inhumanity, to have been stayed a moment by which would
have pointed all our limbs as stiff as icicles, as stiff as those of