The limbs would break like glass or
like wood if they had to be straightened.
He reached and touched the dead face. And the sharp, heavy bruise of
ice bruised his living bowels. He wondered if he himself were freezing
too, freezing from the inside. In the short blond moustache the
life-breath was frozen into a block of ice, beneath the silent
nostrils. And this was Gerald!
Again he touched the sharp, almost glittering fair hair of the frozen
body. It was icy-cold, hair icy-cold, almost venomous. Birkin's heart
began to freeze. He had loved Gerald. Now he looked at the shapely,
strange-coloured face, with the small, fine, pinched nose and the manly
cheeks, saw it frozen like an ice-pebble--yet he had loved it. What was
one to think or feel? His brain was beginning to freeze, his blood was
turning to ice-water. So cold, so cold, a heavy, bruising cold pressing
on his arms from outside, and a heavier cold congealing within him, in
his heart and in his bowels.
He went over the snow slopes, to see where the death had been.
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