Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/61

 "Wonder if he might be Bagley?"

The sun, only a little lower to the west, was glaring down upon the snow, unclouded and still dazzlingly bright as they proceeded upon the way of the old St. Florentin wood road. It had warmth yet, and all the land was glistening and still, in nowise altered in prospect from the hour before until, as the road reached the top of a ridge which was higher than those which lay to the south, the smooth ice-sheet over Lake Huron came into view, reaching away green and dark in streaks where the wind had blown away the snow and then white and dark and white again to the dim, distant, cold gray-blue of the winter horizon. Ragged points—capes and tiny peninsulas—thrust into the ice-sheet as though trying to reach but as though broken and cast back by a great black rock which rose abruptly out of and above the ice half a mile from shore.

The western rise of the rock, upon which the sun was shining, seemed sheer and towering; only about the base, where the lake had tossed up heaps and hummocks of ice, and upon the top had snow gathered. The northern side of the rock seemed less precipitous, but that was mostly in shadow, so that one could not well make out even the limits of the island. Sometimes it seemed half shadow, half rock; sometimes all rock, without shadow, defying the sun. Desolate itself, it dominated desolation—lifeless rock and ice and snow unspecked by moving thing. Even the gulls which might have visited its crannies in summer now, if the water were open, must have gone; for as far as the eyes could see, about the island and beyond it, lay the frozen shroud over the lake.

"Resurrection Rock!" Ethel said, gazing at it with