I suppose it must have been about noon. I sat staring a minute, and my
first numb thought was somehow this: that the Countess Clodagh had
prayed me 'Be first'--for her. Wondrous little now cared I for the
Countess Clodagh in her far unreal world of warmth--precious little for
the fortune which she coveted: millions on millions of fortunes lay
unregarded around me. But that thought, _Be first!_ was deeply suggested
in my brain, as if whispered there. Instinctively, brutishly, as the
Gadarean swine rushed down a steep place, I, rubbing my daft eyes,
arose.
The first thing which my mind opened to perceive was that, while the
tempest was less strong, the ice was now in extraordinary agitation. I
looked abroad upon a vast plain, stretched out to a circular, but waving
horizon, and varied by many hillocks, boulders, and sparkling
meteor-stones that everywhere tinselled the blinding white, some big as
houses, most small as limbs. And this great plain was now rearranging
itself in a widespread drama of havoc, withdrawing in ravines like
mutual backing curtsies, then surging to clap together in passionate
mountain-peaks, else jostling like the Symplegades, fluent and
inconstant as billows of the sea, grinding itself, piling itself,
pouring itself in cataracts of powdered ice, while here and there I saw
the meteor-stones leap spasmodically, in dusts and heaps, like geysers
or spurting froths in a steamer's wake, a tremendous uproar, meantime,
filling all the air.
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