Women in Love

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.