Algernon Blackwood

“ For the sun was now below the rim of the Suchet ridges, flaming with a wonderful sheet of red and yellow light over the huge white plateau, and the isolated trees threw vague shadows that easily ran into a length of half a kilometer. Rapidly they spread, assuming monstrous shapes, half animal, half human; then, deceiving the sight, merged into the strange uniform glow that lies upon a snow-field in the twilight. ”

“ Her slim young figure, topped by the pointed, white snow-cap, was sprite-like.
"Just a little way over the slopes—to meet him," came her reply. She seemed to float above the snow, not on it.
With decision he called her in, and it was the warning in his tone that perhaps made her obey.
"Better rest," he said briefly; "we 've got a long run home in the moonlight." On her skees she came "sishing" back down the gleaming slope to his side, neat and graceful, her shadow shooting ahead like black lightning, enormously elongated. ”

“ IT is a question how many witnesses shall be required to establish the veracity of an occurrence so singular, especially when one of such witnesses is a dog.
Three of us, two men and a girl, had skimmed the snow-covered Jura slopes on our skees since noon, arriving toward four o'clock at the deserted chalet where the fourth was to meet us. Upon the arrival of that fourth hung all the future happiness of the girl, and he was to come from a village far away on the other side. The Christmas rendezvous had been carefully arranged. ”

“ But Dot, guided by some power that the mountains put into her little feet, knew her direction well, and went as straight as a die to the edge of the awful gulf; then stopped dead, buried to her neck in a drift that climbed wave-like upon the very lips of the chasm. It stopped her, as ten minutes before it had also stopped another, coming down from the slopes that lay to the westward. ”

“ He helped her stack the skees, then turned to whistle in the dog, which had stayed behind on the summit of the slope she had just left, and it was at this instant, I think, that I first suddenly became aware of an unusual significance lying behind the little scene. Such moments are beyond explanation or analysis; one can only report them. They pertain, some hold, to a kind of vision. ”

“ Here, Dot,"—turning to his niece,—"stack your skees, and get the food out. He 'll be hungry as a bear."
The three of us bustled about over the crisp snow, and the older man had a wood fire blazing upon the great open hearth in less than ten minutes. The interior of the big room lit up, shadows flew over-head among the rafters, and shafts of cheery yellow light flashed even into the recesses of the vaulted barn that opened out into the cow-sheds in the rear. Outside, the dusk visibly deepened from one minute to the next. ”

“ With the coming of the night they awoke to their true power. They showed their teeth. Our own insignificance became curiously emphasized. I thought of the Creux du Van precipices, sweeping crater-like with their semicircle of dark grandeur, a gulf of snow-drifts about their dreadful lips, six hundred feet of shadows yawning within, and shuddered.
"You 're cold," said Dot, softly, pulling me to the fire, where she warmed her steaming boots. "I 'm cold, too." We piled the wood on ”