The Hollow Land by Jane Gardam

Aye. A great splinter.”
    â€œOh I thowt as you meant juicy with onions.”
    â€œ
Thowt!
” said Bell. “Speak right, can’t yer. You’ll finish up a savage.”
    Under the great shadow of Wild Boar Fell they went and Bell decided he’d leave his bicycle for the vultures, too. “We’ll walk next bit. It’s not owt now. ’Ere—throw yer arms about yerself backwards and forwards. That way yer fingers’ll come back on you. We’ll need ’em shortly.”
    â€œFor icicles?”
    â€œWait on and ye’ll see.”
    But though they walked and walked, Harry saw nothing special—nothing more than the lonely road and the sweeping snowy fells and the lowering head of the Wild Boar rock above them. A beck they came on was as deep with snow as any dry land, and only known to be there by a faint musical tinkling like bells.
    â€œThem’s the fairies,” said Bell. “Folks had to make up something before the telly.”
    â€œMr. Hewitson’s seen the fairies,” said Harry, “he tellt’ me.”
    â€œ
Told
thee. What—our grandad? Old Hewitson? You tek no account of what he says. He’s no better’n Kendal the sweep.
    â€œMind,” he added, “I know he says he did. And his gran did too. Smearing butter over gateposts they was. Over Ladthwaite. Wonder whatever sort of good that did a body.”
    â€œA body?”
    â€œAny body.”
    â€œBell.”
    â€œAye?”
    â€œBell—where’s the icicle ride?”
    â€œNot far now.”
    They turned a little off the road, full into the teeth of a piercing wind coming down to meet them off Mallerstang Edge. “Somewhere very close.”
    But he had begun to look serious.
    â€œBell?”
    â€œAye?”
    â€œBell—where is it we’re going? Bell—I’se tired.”
    â€œ
I’m
tired.
I’m
tired.”
    â€œWell, if you’re tired, too—”
    â€œNo I’se not tired. I’se just telling thee to speak right or your mother’ll stop you coming out.”
    â€œNo, she’ll never. Bell . . .
Bell!
”—for Bell had disappeared now off the road and over a wall. Harry heard his feet go thump, scrunch into a great heap of snow beyond. Then there was quiet.
    â€œ
Bell
,”
 
roared Harry and felt how his feet had gone away, and looked at his fingers, all blue when he took off his glove, and how his face was sharp and stingy and his ears ached and burned at the same time and the wind blew at him, sharp as stakes in the heart. “
Bell
,
 
I want to go
back
.”
    And then three things happened. The wind dropped, Bell’s round face reappeared smiling over the wall, and the sun came suddenly beaming and gleaming from under the lowest and blackest of the dismal clouds to take a last look at the short and bitter day. Long, yellow brilliant rays broke across Castledale, and for miles and miles and miles snow glittered like a million tons of diamonds. The little black snow-posts to mark the fell tracks stuck up like barbed-wire spikes with blue shadows behind them, sharp as arithmetic.
    â€œCome over this now,” said Bell, “and see if it’s been worth it.”
    And Harry climbed up the steps of stone in the wall and put his miserable blue hands in the sopped gloves on top of it and dropped down into the scrunching snow—and deeper than Bell, being smaller, nearly to his waist.
    And there, round a corner to the left where the beck fell sheer, stood high as the sky a chandelier of icicles. Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of them down the shale steps of a waterfall. There were long ones and short ones and middling ones and fat ones like arms and thin ones like threads. They hung down from up as high as you could see and down to your very wellingtons. And not only water had turned to spears of glass, but every living thing about—the grasses, the