The Mammoth Hunters - Jean M. Auel [363]
Ayla knew it was late when she woke up. It seemed unusually bright and everyone else was out of the tent. She grabbed her parka, but got only as far as the opening. When she looked out, she stopped and stared with her mouth hanging open. The shift in the wind had cleared away the summer mist of steaming ice temporarily. She bent her head back to look up at the wall of a glacier towering over her that was so incredibly massive the top was lost in clouds.
Its sheer size made it seem closer than it was, but some gigantic chunks that had once tumbled down the steep jagged wall were strewn together in a jumbled heap perhaps a quarter-mile away. Several people were standing around them. She realized they were the scale that had given her a proper sense of the true size of the immense barrier of ice. The glacier was an incredible spectacle, and incredibly beautiful. In the sunlight—Ayla suddenly noticed the sun was out—it sparkled with millions of shattered crystals of ice that glinted with tints of prismatic hues, but the deep underlying color had tones of the same startling blue that she had seen in the pool. There were no words adequate to describe it; overwhelming had no meaning beside its magnificence, its grandeur, its power.
Ayla finished dressing hurriedly, feeling she had missed out on something. She poured herself a cup of what seemed to be leftover tea with a slight film of ice already forming on top, and discovered it was meat broth instead. She paused only a moment before deciding it was fine, and drank it down. Then she scooped out a ladleful of congealed cooked grains, wrapped them in a thick slice of cold roast meat, and headed toward the rest of the hunters at a fast pace.
“I wondered if you were ever going to wake up,” Talut said, when he saw her coming.
“Why didn’t you wake me?” Ayla asked, then took her last bite.
“It’s not wise to wake someone who is sleeping so soundly, unless it’s an emergency,” Talut answered.
“The spirit needs time for its night travels, so it can come back refreshed,” Vincavec added, coming around to greet her. He made a motion to take both her hands, but she evaded them, quickly brushed his cheek with hers, and was off to examine the ice.
The huge chunks had obviously fallen with some force. They were deeply imbedded, and the ground was churned up around them. That they had also been there for several years was soon apparent, as well. An accumulation of windblown grit, picked up from the rock that was ground to flour at the margins of the ice, coated the top surfaces with a thick layer of dark gray dirt, striated in some places with intervening white layers of compact snow. The surfaces themselves were pitted and rough from melting and refreezing unevenly over the years, and a few small tenacious plants had actually taken root on the ice.
“Come up here, Ayla,” Ranec called. She looked up and saw him standing on top of a high block, tilted slightly askew. She was surprised to see Jondalar beside him. “It’s easy if you come around the side.”
Ayla went around the jumbled pile of ice blocks and clambered up a series of broken shards and slabs. The gritty rock dust ground into the ice made the usually slick surface rough and footing reasonably secure. With a little care, it was easy to climb and move around. When she reached the highest place, Ayla stood up, then closed her eyes. The buffeting wind pushed against her, as though testing her resolve to withstand its force, and the voice of the great wall rumbled, moaned, and cracked nearby. She turned her head toward the intense light above, seen even through closed eyelids, and sensed with the skin of her face the cosmic struggle between the heat from the heavenly fireball, and the cold of the massive ice wall. The air itself tingled with indecision.
Then she opened her eyes. Ice commanded the view, filled her vision. The enormous, majestic, formidable