a full moon rising over a high windswept plain, its silvery light illuminating a curving slice of river cradled in a shallow bowl of a valley. The great round moon poured down its light as it passed overhead, and the stars wheeled slowly in the sky until it sank again below the western horizon.
All was dark then . . . but only for a moment. Before Kit could blink, the moon rose again, faster this time, passing over the bend in the river once more. The moon soared and sank, only to repeat the process again and yet again. With every repetition the moon flew faster, its rising and setting merging into a single fluid tracery of light, a shining arc across the limitless star field. This bright arc widened, expanding into a luminous band encircling the wandering earth.
Out on the plain he saw a mountain rising in the distance, white and ghostly in the silver moonlight. The mountain rose higher, and Kit saw that it was moving, slowly, inexorably, following the course of the river, which now ran with chunks of ice. With the mountain came snow. Kit could see the drifts deepening over the landscape, spreading, merging, covering the land, covering the rocks and trees, filling the valley, covering everything. And still the snow fell—as if the inexhaustible vaults of winter had opened and poured out their unending store upon the world below.
And all the while the mountain lurched nearer, a glacier on the move, growing even as it came, driving all before it: trees, rocks, boulders, entire hills. On and on it came, tearing, grinding with the low rumble of constant thunder, annihilating everything that fell beneath the massive wall of its leading edge, gouging the land, carving deep into the soft soil of the river valley, its stupendous weight forming new hills on either side, shaping landscapes as it passed.
And still the ice mountain grew, spreading as it came; it stretched now from horizon to horizon, gathering cold, draining the rivers, lowering the seas, leaching moisture from all it touched, from the very atmosphere until the air became dry and brittle, and still it grew, shimmering with a terrible majesty beneath the brilliant band of light that was the ever-racing moon: a continent of ice on the move, pushing up mountains, slicing out canyons, tilting the earth with its passing.
More images wheeled before Kit’s unblinking eyes: an endless line of enormous woolly mammoths staggering across a plain drifted high with wind-whipped snow . . . fire falling from the sky in burning chunks the size of boulders, setting the hills ablaze . . . an ocean locked tight, its waves thrashed into hard, motionless peaks . . . bony carcasses of starved creatures piled in a frozen bog . . . a bear on its hind legs gnawing at the bark of a tree . . . a man, woman, and two infant children dressed in wolf skin and forever huddled in a frozen embrace . . . a high mountain pass leading down to lands yet green, lands that had not felt the bitter sting of killing cold . . . and more, faster and faster until one image could not be distinguished from another.
Reeling from what he had seen, Kit closed his eyes, but the images persisted, flickering through his consciousness in a mist of motion and light: fusing, swirling, all detail muted and lost, merging into a dense, luminous fog that resolved into the Milky Way, the measureless star path of the galaxy. The shining mist slowly dissipated until at last it was swallowed in the end by the eternal darkness of empty space.
CHAPTER 35
In Which a Remedy Is Pursued
Dazed and drained, Kit waited for the dawn to lighten the sky to return to the Bone House. If the remedy for his bewildered state could be found, he imagined it might be there. When the first faint traces of daylight gave texture to the winter landscape below the rock shelter, Kit rose, stepped carefully over the sleeping bodies around him, and stole down the narrow trail leading into the valley and, ultimately, up to the high woodland above.
Fresh snow had fallen in the night, and he ploughed through the drifts, moving with an urgency born of a dream-troubled night. He reached the woodland on the plateau above the valley and, alert to lurking predators, hurried through the frigid, winter-bound forest to the clearing. It was farther than he remembered; impatience drove him to