He sighed with relief when they stopped at last on a shelf next to a wall of black rock that went up at an almost vertical angle. They were close to two thousand feet above the lake, which shimmered in the rays of the noonday sun. The glacier was out of sight around an escarpment, but Rawlins could feel the raw cold that it radiated, as if someone had left a refrigerator door open.

Thurston pointed to a round opening encased in concrete at the base of the vertical cliff. “Welcome to the Ice Palace.”

“It looks like a drainage culvert,” Rawlins said.

Thurston laughed and crouched low, ducking his head as he led the way into a corrugated metal tunnel about five feet in diameter. The others followed him in a stooping walk that was made necessary by their backpacks. The passage ended after about a hundred feet and opened into a dimly lit tunnel. The shiny wet orange walls of meta-mprphic rock were striped black with darker minerals.

Rawlins looked around in wonder. “You could drive a truck through this thing.” "

With room to spare. “It's thirty feet high and thirty feet wide,” Thurston said.

“Too bad you couldn't squeeze Fifi through that culvert,” Rawlins said.

“We've thought of it. There's an entrance big enough for a car near the power plant, but Bernie is afraid she'd get beat up running around these tunnels.”

“Fifi has a very delicate constitution,” LeBlanc said with a snort.

The Frenchman opened a plastic locker set against a wall. He passed around rubber boots and hard hats with miners' lights on the crowns.

Minutes later, they set off into the tunnel, the scuffle of their boots echoing off the walls. As they plodded along, Rawlins squinted into the gloom beyond the reach of his headlamp. “Not exactly the Great White Way.”

“The power company put the lighting in when they drilled through. A lot of those dead bulbs haven't been replaced.”

“You've probably been asked this, but what brought you into glaciology?” Rawlins said.

“That's not the first time I've heard the question. People think glaciologists are a bit odd. We study huge, ancient, slow-moving masses of ice that take centuries to get anywhere. Hardly a job for a grown man, wouldn't you say, Bernie?”

“Maybe not, but I met a nice Eskimo girl once in the Yukon.”

“Spoken like a true glaciologist,” Thurston said. “We have in common a love of beauty and a desire to get outdoors. Many of us were seduced into this calling by our first awe-inspiring view of an ice field.” He gestured around at the walls of the tunnel. “So it's ironic that we spend weeks at a time under the glacier, far from the sunlight, like a bunch of moles.”

“Look what it has done to me,” LeBlanc said. “Constant thirty-five degrees and one hundred percent humidity. I used to be tall and blond-haired, but I have shrunk and become a shaggy beast.”