They passed the inn with its painted shutters and balcony, a few
cottages, half buried in the snow; then the snow-buried silent sawmill
by the roofed bridge, which crossed the hidden stream, over which they
ran into the very depth of the untouched sheets of snow. It was a
silence and a sheer whiteness exhilarating to madness. But the perfect
silence was most terrifying, isolating the soul, surrounding the heart
with frozen air.
'It's a marvellous place, for all that,' said Gudrun, looking into his
eyes with a strange, meaning look. His soul leapt.
'Good,' he said.
A fierce electric energy seemed to flow over all his limbs, his muscles
were surcharged, his hands felt hard with strength. They walked along
rapidly up the snow-road, that was marked by withered branches of trees
stuck in at intervals. He and she were separate, like opposite poles of
one fierce energy. But they felt powerful enough to leap over the
confines of life into the forbidden places, and back again.
Birkin and Ursula were running along also, over the snow. He had
disposed of the luggage, and they had a little start of the sledges.
Ursula was excited and happy, but she kept turning suddenly to catch
hold of Birkin's arm, to make sure of him.
'This is something I never expected,' she said. 'It is a different
world, here.' They went on into a snow meadow. There they were overtaken by the
sledge, that came tinkling through the silence. It was another mile
before they came upon Gudrun and Gerald on the steep up-climb, beside
the pink, half-buried shrine.
Then they passed into a gulley, where were walls of black rock and a
river filled with snow, and a still blue sky above. Through a covered
bridge they went, drumming roughly over the boards, crossing the
snow-bed once more, then slowly up and up, the horses walking swiftly,
the driver cracking his long whip as he walked beside, and calling his
strange wild HUE-HUE!, the walls of rock passing slowly by, till they
emerged again between slopes and masses of snow. Up and up, gradually
they went, through the cold shadow-radiance of the afternoon, silenced
by the imminence of the mountains, the luminous, dazing sides of snow
that rose above them and fell away beneath.
They came forth at last in a little high table-land of snow, where
stood the last peaks of snow like the heart petals of an open rose. In
the midst of the last deserted valleys of heaven stood a lonely
building with brown wooden walls and white heavy roof, deep and
deserted in the waste of snow, like a dream. It stood like a rock that
had rolled down from the last steep slopes, a rock that had taken the
form of a house, and was now half-buried. It was unbelievable that one
could live there uncrushed by all this terrible waste of whiteness and
silence and clear, upper, ringing cold.