If he had been too warm before, the prince was too cold now. The hill of
the Remora was one solid mass of frozen steel, and the cold rushed out
of it like the breath of some icy beast, which indeed it _was_. All
around were things like marble statues of men in armour: they were the
dead bodies of the knights, horses and all, who had gone out of old to
fight the Remora, and who had been frosted up by him. The prince felt
his blood stand still, and he grew faint; but he took heart, for there
was no time to waste. Yet he could nowhere see the Remora. “Hi!” shouted
the prince. Then, from a narrow chink at the bottom of the smooth, black
hill,--a chink no deeper than that under a door, but a mile wide,--stole
out a hideous head!
It was as fiat as the head of a skate-fish, it was deathly pale, and two
chill-blue eyes, dead-coloured like stones, looked out of it.
Then there came a whisper, like the breath of the bitter east wind on a
wintry day:
“Where are you, and how can I come to you?”
“Here I am!” said the prince from the top of the hill.
Then the flat, white head set itself against the edge of the chink from
which it had peeped, and slowly, like the movement of a sheet of ice, it
slipped upwards and curled upwards, and up, and up! There seemed no end
to it at all; and it moved horribly, without feet, holding on by its own
frost to the slippery side of the frozen hill. Now all the lower part of
the black hill was covered with the horrid white thing coiled about
it in smooth, flat shiny coils; and still the head was higher than the
rest; and still the icy cold came nearer and nearer, like Death.
The prince almost fainted: everything seemed to swim; and in one moment
more he would have fallen stiff on the mountain-top, and the white head
would have crawled over him, and the cold coils would have slipped over
him and turned him to stone. And still the thing slipped up, from the
chink under the mountain.
But the prince made a great effort; he moved, and in two steps he was
far away, down in the valley where it was not so very cold.
“Hi!” he shouted, as soon as his tongue could move within his chattering
teeth.
There came a clear, hissing answer, like frozen words dropping round
him:
“Wait till I come down. What do you want?”
Then the white folds began to slide, like melting ice, from the black
hill.
Prince Prigio felt the air getting warmer behind him, and colder in
front of him.
He looked round, and there were the trees beginning to blacken in the
heat, and the grass looking like a sea of fire along the plains; for the
Firedrake was coming!
The prince just took time to shout, “The Firedrake is going to pay you a
visit!” and then he soared to the top of a neighbouring hill, and looked
on at what followed.
[Illustration: Chapter Eleven]