Just below the soaring spires of the southern mountains, too steep themselves for snow to rest upon, small basins formed, cirques that nestled against the sides of the pinnacles; and these cirques were the birthplaces of glaciers. As the light, dry, lacy snowflakes drifted into the depressions high in the mountains, created by minute amounts of water freezing in cracks and then expanding to loosen tons of rock, they piled up. Eventually the weight of the mass of frozen water broke the delicate flakes into pieces that coalesced into small round balls of ice: firn, corn snow.
Firn did not form at the surface, but deep in the cirque, and when more snow fell, the heavier compact spheres were pushed up and over the edge of the nest. As more of them accumulated, the nearly circular balls of ice were pressed together so hard by the sheer weight above that a fraction of the energy was released as heat. For just an instant, they melted at the many points of contact and immediately refroze, welding the balls together. As the layers of ice deepened, the greater pressure rearranged the structure of the molecules into solid, crystalline ice, but with a subtle difference: the ice flowed.
Glacier ice, formed under tremendous pressure, was more dense; yet at the lower levels the great mass of solid ice flowed as smoothly as any liquid. Separating around obstructions, such as the soaring tops of mountains, and rejoining on the other side – often taking a large part of the rock with it and leaving behind sharp-peaked islands – a glacier followed the contours of the land, grinding and reshaping it as it went.
The river of solid ice had currents and eddies, stagnant pools and rushing centers, but it moved to a different time, as ponderously slow as it was massively huge. It could take years to move inches. But time didn't matter. It had all the time in the world. As long as the average temperature stayed below the critical line, the glacier fed and grew.
Mountain cirques were not the only birthplaces. Glaciers formed on level ground, too, and once they covered a large enough area, the chilling effect spread the precipitation out of the anticyclone funnel, centered in the middle, to the extreme margins; the thickness of the ice remained nearly the same throughout.
Glaciers were never entirely dry. Some water was always seeping down from the melting caused by pressure. It filled in small cracks and crannies, and when it chilled and refroze, it expanded in all directions. The motion of a glacier was outward in all directions from its origin, and the speed of its motion depended on the slope of its surface, not on the slope of the ground underneath. If the surface slope was great, the water within the glacier flowed downhill faster through the chinks in the ice and spread out the ice as it refroze. They grew faster when they were young, near large oceans or seas, or in mountains where the high peaks assured heavy snowfall. They slowed down after they spread out, their broad surface reflecting the sunlight away and the air above the center turning colder and drier with less snow.
The glaciers in the mountains to the south had spread out from their high peaks, filled the valleys to the level of high mountain passes, and spilled through them. During an earlier advancing period, the mountain glaciers filled the deep trench of a fault line separating the mountain foreland and the ancient massif. It covered the highland, then spread across to the old eroded mountains on the northern fringe. The ice receded during the temporary warming – which was coming to an end – and melted in the lowland fault valley, creating a large river and a long, moraine-dammed lake, but the plateau glacier on the highland they were crossing stayed frozen.
They could not build a fire directly on the ice and had planned to use the bowl boat as a base for the river stones they had brought to build the fire on. But first they had to empty all the burning stones out of the round craft. As Ayla picked up the heavy mammoth hide, it occurred to her that they could just as well use it as a base upon which to build a fire. Even if it scorched a little, it wouldn't matter. It pleased her that she had thought to bring it. Everyone, including the horses, had water and a little food.
While they were stopped, the sun disappeared entirely behind heavy clouds, and before they started on their way again, thick snow began falling with grim determination. The north wind howled across the icy expanse; there was nothing on the whole vast sheet covering the massif to stand in its way. A blizzard was in the making.
42
As the snowfall thickened, the force of the wind from the northwest suddenly increased. It slammed into them with a blast of cold air that shoved them along as though they were no more than an insignificant piece of the horizontal curtain of white that surrounded them.
"I think we'd better wait this out," Jondalar shouted to be heard above the howl.
They fought to set up their tent while the icy blasts seized the small shelter, tore the stakes out of the ice, and left the tent billowing and flapping. The violent, sinewy wind threatened to rip the sheet of leather from the grasp of the two puny living souls trying to make their way across the ice, daring to present an obstacle to the furious, snow-choked blizzard raging across the flat surface.
"How are we going to keep the tent down?" Ayla asked. "Is it always this bad up here?"
"I don't remember it blowing this hard before, but I'm not surprised."
The horses were standing mutely, their heads down, stoically enduring the storm. Wolf was close beside them, digging out a hole for himself. "Maybe we could get one of the horses to stand on the loose end and hold it down until we get it staked," Ayla suggested.
With one thing leading to another, they came up with a makeshift solution, using the horses as both stakes and tent supports. They draped the leather tent over the backs of both horses, then Ayla coaxed Whinney to stand on one of the edges, turned under, hoping the mare wouldn't shift too much and let it up. Ayla and Jondalar huddled together, with the wolf under their bent knees, sitting, almost under the bellies of the horses, on the other end of the tent that was wrapped around underneath them.
It was dark before the squall blew itself out, and they had to camp for the night at the same place, but they set the tent up properly first. In the morning, Ayla was puzzled by some dark stains near the edge of the tent that Whinney had stood on. She wondered about them as they hurried to break camp early the next morning.
They made more progress the second day, in spite of climbing over pressure mounds of broken ice and working their way around an area of several yawning cracks, all oriented in the same direction. A storm blew up in the afternoon again, though the wind was not as strong, and it blew over more quickly, allowing them to continue their Journey during the late afternoon.
Toward evening, Ayla noticed that Whinney was limping. She felt her heart beat faster and a rush of fear when she looked closer and saw red smudges on the ice. She picked up Whinney's foot and examined her hoof. It was cut to the quick and bleeding.
"Jondalar, look at this. Her feet are all cut up. What did that to her?" Ayla said.
He looked, and then he examined Racer's hooves while Ayla was looking at the rest of Whinney's. He found the same kind of injuries, then frowned. "It must be the ice," he said. "You'd better check Wolf, too."
The pads of the wolf's paws showed damage, though not quite as bad as the horses' hooves. "What are we going to do?" Ayla said. "They're crippled, or will be soon."
"It never occurred to me that the ice could be so sharp it could cut up their hooves," Jondalar said, very upset. "I tried to think of everything, but I didn't think about that." He was stricken with remorse.