Rushing toward the south and southeast, along a front of a thousand miles, all through Saturday afternoon the polar air swept onward. About one o’clock Duluth went under, along with Pierre, and Casper; within an hour, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Cheyenne. As the sun grew low, the blizzard hurtled upon Sioux City, North Platte, and Denver. In the winter twilight the lights came on in Milwaukee, Des Moines, and Omaha; they shone for a few minutes and then in the flying snow were blotted out. Next in line before the fury of the North lay Chicago, Kansas City, and Pueblo.

Throughout the day the polar air had advanced more than eight hundred miles southeastward. It had warmed slightly, and because of mixing with the more southerly air its line of demarcation was not quite so sharp. But still its temperature was below zero, and its northwest winds at forty miles an hour whirled before them a blinding and cutting blast of snow.

Of old time, that broad country of the plains knew raiders, but none more furious than this. Swifter than Sioux, more terrible than Assiniboine, more pitiless than Arapaho, it swept upon town and farmstead.

SIXTH DAY

1

Man is of the air, but through dim ages that-which-was-to-be-man lived not in the ocean of the air but in the ocean of the water. And even yet the saltness of blood is as the saltness of the sea.

Natural man, living in the air, is unconscious of the air, as the fish of the water. But man having left the ocean behind grows conscious of water, and acknowledges his dependence. Also, perhaps, in racial memory he strains backward through mythology and religion toward that time when water, as in the womb, was his all-surrounding element.

In the Christian Bible the theme of water runs from the second verse of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation. As symbol it is multiform—water of purification, water of separation, water of baptism, water of life.

Even more is water the theme of that ancient religion of nature which pervades so many lands—of Tammuz pierced and dying, of Adonis lamented, of the Freeing of the Waters, of the Waste Land and the wounded Fisher King. For if Adonis come not again or if King Pelles be not healed of his wound in the thighs, then the rains fall not and the waters flow not, neither do the tamarisks blossom nor the heads form on the barley, nor the cattle bow themselves and bring forth. Nay, if the waters be not freed, no man has power to beget the child within the womb. Then man is afraid of his own weakness, and the land of the Dolorous Stroke lies waste; there is no rain, and only far off the crackle of dry thunder.