And
when he spoke to the boy his own question surprised him, for
he said for the first time in his life, "What am I doing here?"
And the little boy, with very grave eyes, answered, "I suppose
you are dead."
He had (also for the first time) a doubt of his spiritual destiny.
He looked round on a towering landscape of frozen peaks and plains,
and said, "Is this hell?" And as the child stared, but did not answer,
he knew it was heaven.
All over that colossal country, white as the world round
the Pole, little boys were playing, rolling each other down
dreadful slopes, crushing each other under falling cliffs;
for heaven is a place where one can fight for ever without hurting.
Smith suddenly remembered how happy he had been as a child,
rolling about on the safe sandhills around Conway.
Right above Smith's head, higher than the cross of St. Paul's,
but curving over him like the hanging blossom of a harebell, was a
cavernous crag of snow. A hundred feet below him, like a landscape
seen from a balloon, lay snowy flats as white and as far away.
He saw a little boy stagger, with many catastrophic slides,
to that toppling peak; and seizing another little boy by the leg,
send him flying away down to the distant silver plains.
There he sank and vanished in the snow as if in the sea;
but coming up again like a diver rushed madly up the steep once more,
rolling before him a great gathering snowball, gigantic at last,
which he hurled back at the mountain crest, and brought both the boy
and the mountain down in one avalanche to the level of the vale.
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