Page:Karel Čapek - The Absolute at Large (1927).djvu/186

 coming on. Should he turn back? But he couldn't have far to go now!

The fitful gale had changed into a steady blizzard. Clouds rolled along the slope, a dark and dirty mist full of hurtling sleet. The snow rushed down horizontally, straight into his face, blocking up the eyes, nose and mouth; with wet frozen fingers it had to be dug, half melted, from the cavities of the ears and eyes. The front of the messenger's body was covered with a layer of snow two inches thick; his coat was rigid, as stiff and heavy as a board—you could not bend it; the cakes of snow on his boot-soles grew bigger and heavier with every step. And in the forest it was getting dark. And yet, good heavens, it was barely two in the afternoon!

Suddenly a greenish-yellow darkness poured over the forest, and the snow gushed down like a cloudburst. Flakes the size of your hand, wet and heavy, flew whirling by so thickly that the dividing line between earth and air was lost. A man cannot see a step in front of him. He breathes the flakes in, wades on through the roaring blizzard that dashes high over his head, pushes on blindly as if he were cutting a little passage down there under the snow. He has but one overmastering instinct—to push on. He yearns for one thing only—to breathe something other than snow. He can no longer lift his feet from the snow; he drags them through the drifts reaching