Conan entered the opening. The light of the rising sun glanced and flashed from the translucent ice walls on eirner side, breaking up into rainbow patterns and polychrome gleams. Conan had the sensation of walking by some magical means through the solid substance of a colossal gem.
Then, as he penetrated deeper into the glacier, the darkness congealed around him. Still, he doggedly set one foot before the other, plodding onward. He raised the collar of his bearskin cloak to protect his face from the numbing cold that poured past him, making his eyeballs ache and forcing him to take short, shallow breaths to keep his lungs from being frosted. Crystals of ice formed like a delicate mask upon his face, to shatter with each movement and as quickly to re-form. But he went on, carefully holding that which he carried so gingerly inside his cloak. Then in the gloom before him opened two cold green eyes, which stared into the roots of his soul. These luminous orbs cast a gelid, submarine light of their own. By their faint, fungoid phosphorescence, he could see that there the cavern ended in a round well, which was the ice worm's nest. Coil on undulating сой, its immense length was curled in the hollow of its nest. Its boneless form was covered with the silken nap of diick white fur. Its mouth was merely a jawless, circular opening, now puckered and closed. Above the mouth, the two luminous orbs gleamed out of a smooth, rounded, featureless, eel-like head.
Replete, the ice worm took a few heartbeats to react to Conan's presence. During the countless eons that the thing of the snows had dwelt in the cold silences of Snow Devil Glacier., no puny man-thing had ever challenged it in the frozen depths of its nest. Now its weird, trilling, mind-binding song rose about Conan, pouring over him in lulling, overpowering, narcotic waves.
But it was too late. Conan threw back his cloak to expose his burden. This was his heavy steel horned Asgardian helm, into which he had packed the glowing coals of his fire, and in which the head of his ax also lay buried, held in place by a loop of the chin strap around the handle. A rein from his horse's harness was looped around the ax helve and the chin strap.
Holding the end of the rein in one hand, Conan whirled the whole mass over his head, round and round, as if he were whirling a sling. The rash of air fanned the faintly glowing coals to red, then to yellow, then to white. A stench of burning helmet padding arose.
The ice worm raised its blunt head. Its circular mouth slowly opened, revealing a ring of small, inward-pointing teeth. As the piping sound grew to an intolerable pitch and the black circle of mouth moved toward him, Conan stopped the whirl of the helmet on die end of its thong. He snatched out the ax, whose helve was charred, smoking and flaming where it entered the fiercely glowing ax head. A quick cast sent the incandescent weapon looping into the cavernous maw. Holding the helmet by one of its horns, Conan hurled the glowing coals after the ax. Then he turned and ran.
Conan never quite knew how he reached the exit. The writhing agony from the thing of the snows shook die glacier. Ice cracked thunderously all around him. The draft of interstellar cold no longer wafted out of the tunnel; instead, a blinding, swirling fog of steam choked the air.
Stumbling, slipping, and falling on the slick, uneven surface of the ice, banging into one side wall of the tunnel and then the other, Conan at last reached the outer air. The glacier trembled beneath his feet with the titanic convulsions of the dying monster within. Plumes of steam wafted from a score of crevasses and caverns on either side of Conan, who, slipping and skidding, ran down the snowy slope. He angled off to one side to get free of the ice. But, before he reached the solid ground of the mountainside, with its jagged boulders and stunted trees, the glacier exploded. When the white-hot steel of the ax met the frigid interior of the monster, something had to give way.
With a crashing roar, the ice quivered, broke up, hurled glassy fragments into the air, and collapsed into a chaotic mass of ice and pouring water, soon hidden by a vast cloud of vapor. Conan lost his footing, fell, tumbled, rolled, slid, and fetched up with braising force against a boulder on the edge of the ice flow. Snow stuffed his mouth and blinded his eyes. A big piece of ice up-ended toppled, and struck his boulder, nearly burying him in fragments of ice.
Half stunnned, Conan dragged himself out from under the mass of broken ice. Although cautious moving of his limbs showed no bones to be broken, he bore enough bruises to have been in a battle. Above him, a tremendous cloud of vapor and glittering ice crystals whirled upward from the site of the ice worm's cavern, now a black crater. Fragments of ice and slush poured into this crater from all sides. The whole level of the glacier in the area had sunk.
Little by little the scene returned to normal. The biting mountain breeze blew away the clouds of vapor. The water from the melting of the ice froze again. The glacier returned to its usual near-immobility.
Battered and weary, Conan limped down into the pass. Lamed as he was, he must now walk all the way to far Nemedia or Ophir, unless he could buy, beg, borrow or steal another horse. But he went with a high heart, turning his bruised face southward ... to the golden South, where shining cities lifted tall towers to a balmy sun, and where a strong man with courage and luck could win gold, wine, and soft, full-breasted women.