an, who is the most restless of life, ever in
revolt against the dictum that all movement must in the end come to
the cessation of movement.
But at front and rear, unawed and indomitable, toiled the two men
who were not yet dead. Their bodies were covered with fur and
soft-tanned leather. Eyelashes and cheeks and lips were so coated with
the crystals from their frozen breath that their faces were not
discernible. This gave them the seeming of ghostly masques,
undertakers in a spectral world at the funeral of some ghost. But
under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and
mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure,
pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien
and pulseless as the abysses of space.
They traveled on without speech, saving their breath for the work of
their bodies. On every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a
tangible presence. It affected their minds as the many atmospheres
of deep water affect the body of the diver. It crushed them with the
weight of unending vastness and unalterable decree. It crushed them
into the remotest recesses of their own minds, pressing out of them,
like juices from the grape, all the false ardors and exaltations and
undue self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves
finite and small, specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and
little wisdom amidst the play and interplay of the great