It enters the pearl blinds, it wets the silk curtains; A fur coat feels cold, a cotton mat flimsy; Bows become rigid, can hardly be drawn And the metal of armour congeals on the men; The sand-sea deepens with fathomless ice, And darkness masses its endless clouds; But we drink to our guest bound home from camp, And play him barbarian lutes, guitars, harps; Till at dusk, when the drifts are crushing our tents And our frozen red flags cannot flutter in the wind,
But these doubts were no support to her, nothing on which she could rest, and she sunk into the fathomless depths of despair.
She had never been that way before: neither flowers nor grass grew there; nothing but bare, gray, sandy ground stretched out to the whirlpool, where the water, like foaming mill-wheels, whirled round everything that it seized, and cast it into the fathomless deep.
