Weatherbee was also
feeling somewhat better, and crawled out beside him. They propped
themselves in the snow beneath the moveless wind-vane, and waited.
The stillness of death was about them. In other climes, when
nature falls into such moods, there is a subdued air of
expectancy, a waiting for some small voice to take up the broken
strain. Not so in the North. The two men had lived seeming eons
in this ghostly peace.
They could remember no song of the past; they could conjure no
song of the future. This unearthly calm had always been--the
tranquil silence of eternity.
Their eyes were fixed upon the north. Unseen, behind their backs,
behind the towering mountains to the south, the sun swept toward
the zenith of another sky than theirs. Sole spectators of the
mighty canvas, they watched the false dawn slowly grow. A faint
flame began to glow and smoulder. It deepened in intensity,
ringing the changes of reddish-yellow, purple, and saffron. So
bright did it become that Cuthfert thought the sun must surely be
behind it--a miracle, the sun rising in the north! Suddenly,
without warning and without fading, the canvas was swept clean.
There was no color in the sky.
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