Free The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas, Elizabeth Rokkan

there. Don’t think about it.
    They began to walk downwards along the banks of the river, along beaches and inland among the hillocks. The land sloped; the river found its voice.
    Hurry! They rushed across sticks and stones. But they had to look carefully at the same time.
    The turbulent, leaping procession of lanterns kept company across the river, twinkling in the hard ice tracery edging it. In between them the water was black. The glimmer from the lanterns did not reach very far. Out there was the deep unknown. Far below they could just hear the waterfall.
    There was nothing to be seen along the river banks.
    We expected that, but still – that’s how it is with searching.
    A shout from the first to climb down. ‘Come and look!’
    At once they all saw it. At once Siss saw it. None of the men had had time for a walk to the falls that had been talked about so much this autumn, and the ice palace had grown so much only recently. Throughout the period of frost the water had gradually acquired a larger surface on which to build. The men raised their lanterns towards the sculptured waterfall, thunderstruck by what they saw.
    Siss looked at them, at the palace, the darkness and the lanterns-she would never forget this expedition.
    The crowd descended the slope on both sides of the waterfall, crawling out on to the uneven ice, shining their lanterns into all the crannies they could find.
    The palace was twice as big in this uncertain light. The falls were high, and the water had built up from the ground to the very top. The men shone their lanterns on to the sheer, glistening sides. They were hard and closed; the snow had found no foothold but was piled up at the bottom. Up on top, however, the snow lay and provided a covering for the clefts between the pinnacles and domes. The lantern light wavered only a short way up the sides; further up, the ice walls were grey in the darkness. Deep inside, like a menacing beast, the self-enclosed river roared.
    But the palace was dark and dead; no light came from within. The men could not see how it looked inside the rooms; their lights did not reach far enough. All the same, the searchers were bewitched.
    The water roared within the palace, dashed itself into frothagainst the rock beneath and emerged again as froth and spray, from under towers and walls, reassembled and was the same mighty current as before, hurrying on. In this densely packed midnight it seemed impossible to guess how far.
    Nothing to be seen except the palace and the river and immensity.
    The palace was closed.
    Siss looked to see whether the men were disappointed. No. They showed nothing. And, after all, it depended on what each of them expected to find. Everything depended on precisely that.
    But the men just stood.
    How has this actually been made?
    Nobody was bothering about Siss now. They left her to accompany her father, and brought her no questions. They simply went on with the search. Nobody could have penetrated further into the mass of ice than they did. They converged from both sides in the snow on top of the domes and shouted advice to each other against the roar of the falls.
    A shout came. ‘There’s an opening here after all!’
    They hurried to the spot. It was an entry almost hidden between green walls. Two of the smallest forced their way in, holding a lantern high.
    Nothing there either. Only an icy breath, much colder than it was outside, that chilled them to the marrow. Outside it was mild now. An ice chamber, and no more openings to be found. Behind it churned the blind eternal roar.
    They shouted to each other in the roaring chamber that there was nothing there! Then they shone the light around it once more, and found a fissure smaller than a hand’s breadth and with water gurgling at the edges.
    Nothing.
    They squeezed out again to the others. ‘Nothing,’ they reported.
    ‘Might have expected it.’
    The men looked helplessly at the construction of ice rising rampant into the air. Their