Dazzled, we walked on. Charlotte clung to her bewigged head with one hand and to me with the other, and she stumbled along with her eyes shut, either because she was fast asleep or because the sunlight hurt them. I, too, found it difficult to see. There seemed to be little flickering movements just at the edge of my eyes, and I thought I was becoming Intoxicated or Delirious.

Then Charlotte spoke.

“Lucy, I cannot walk another step!” she said. “I’m going to faint.”

“If we lie down here, we shall die,” I told her. “We shall freeze in a moment and become like the mummy in Signor Rolipolio’s Exhibition.”

She shuddered and clutched Herr Woodenkopf even tighter to her chest.

“All wrinkled and horrid?” she said.

“Very wrinkled and extremely horrid. No, Charlotte, we must keep going.”

“But we’ll never find a way through that—” she said, pointing at the glacier and squinting with the effort to see what she was pointing at. “We’ll fall into a crevasse, like Otto, in The Secrets of the North, and get crushed flat. We’ll get lost and go round in circles and go mad. Oh, Lucy, I just can’t. We’ve come as far as this—they’ll never find us now—please let’s rest….”

I was exhausted too, of course, but as the elder I had to pretend not to be. Such is the Responsibility of age and experience. There are no corresponding rewards that I have discovered, but that is by the way.

“No!” I said. “We must move on. Think of the south, Charlotte!”

“I can’t….”

“Of course you can if you try. Think of…orange trees and olive groves and things like that.”

“I don’t like olives.”

“All right, think of melons then. Hot things.”

“Melons are cold….”

“You’re being very trying, Charlotte,” I said sternly.

“I am trying,” she said, having misheard me. So I said nothing more but merely tugged her onward. She fell three times, and bruised her legs, and began to cry, and Herr Woodenkopf’s wig came off and had to be put back on, and her dress was soaked and mine was torn, and then I twisted my foot slipping on the ice, and then Charlotte fell for a fourth time and just lay there, still, crying, and I thought: no, no! This is the End. We shall die. We shall die. We shall die….

—

There was a sort of darkness in the air around us.

I felt colder and colder, and I longed to pull that hovering darkness down and wrap it around us like a blanket. I know now that the darkness was Death; but even knowing that, I would have pulled it down, if I could.

I heard a voice, and felt a hand upon my shoulder. Charlotte was shaking me.

“Lucy!” I heard her say. “Lucy! That’s the man I saw in the forest—Lucy, wake up!”