In the other direction, the forested slopes unrolled themselves downward into a narrow valley before rising sharply on the other side in a bare cliff that formed the base of another hill, rising as high on its side of the valley as Blade's did on its. The valley thus formed ran roughly north and south, as far as Blade could tell from the sun. To the south of the two flanking hills were yet more hills and hummocks, suggesting a whole range spreading east and west, many miles wide and perhaps many hundreds of miles long. Through the valley itself ran a fair-sized river; Blade caught its silver-blue glimmer through the black-green masses of the trees. Then he turned to the north.

Part of the view to the north was cut off by the swell of the hill, but he could see enough to suddenly feel a chill from more than the breeze. To the north was a flat plain, and far away on the remote horizon of that plain was another silver-blue hue glimmering in the sky. Not the friendly' glimmer of a river, but the steel cold glare of endless miles of ice hurling back the sun. He had once seen the same thing from the deck of a ship approaching the Greenland ice cap. Out there on the northern plain, many miles away but glaring so fiercely that it was visible here, a vast glacial mass was marching south. For a moment he almost fancied he could hear the grinding roar of the billions of tons of ice scraping their way forward, stripping the countryside down to sterile bedrock, and the hill beneath his feet seemed to shudder in anticipation of the glaciers hurling themselves at it or perhaps over it.

Then he laughed, and the sensation passed. Glaciers took centuries, if not millennia, to cover the distance that separated him from that sinister ice. By the time the ice began pushing at the hill where he was standing, his great-great-great grandchildren (if any) would be old men and women.