Snowflake by Paul Gallico Read Free Book Online

surface once more to be buffeted and battered almost beyond endurance.
    Sometimes these violent tempests would last for days, driving Snowflake ahead of them for many hundreds of agonising miles before they blew themselves out and came to an end.

    Yet, the sea could be calm and friendly too, and there were days when the surface was as still as her lovely lake had been, with the sunshine sparkling on blue waters that were hardly more than ruffled by a delicate wind.
    But how vast and lonely it was at those times, and Snowflake thought she almost preferred the menace and excitement of the storm to the empty spaces with not a single thing to see as far as the eye could reach.
    Sometimes there might be the masts of ships and the tips of smokestacks to be glimpsed far away below the horizon, or she might be so fortunate as to encounter a single steamer ploughing its way across the empty desert of water, and then Snowflake would try to throw herself in its way just for company, even though the weight of the giant hurt her. But for the most part she appeared to be the centre of a wide and empty circle made by the line where the sea met the sky all about her.
    And too, now that Raindrop and the children were gone, there was no one to talk to any more, at least no one that Snowflake cared about, and she learned what it was to be lonely.

    One day was just like another in Snowflake’s life now—waves, the huge ships with their threshing screws that turned the water to milk behind them, dolphins, porpoises, sharks and whales and other monsters that lurked in the deep. And the trackless sea.
    And yet it was not quite the same, for while she did not know where she was going, Snowflake had been driven steadily southwards. The water of which she was a part became warmer, the sun hotter, the seas calmer and the storms less frequent.
    Thus she was able to spend more days on the surface under the blue skies, with the burning sun beating down. And gradually Snowflake became aware of a change that was taking place in her. She had felt that for some time she had been growing weaker. The great zest for life and love of living, the pleasure she used to take in all things large and small, was beginning to pass. She was tired much of the time, even when she had been doing nothing but resting and dreaming.
    And Snowflake knew that she must be approaching the end of her days.

    How this end was to take place, what it would be like, or where she would go, Snowflake could not tell. But she was aware that somehow it would have to do with the sun. She did not understand this and it saddened her, for she remembered how happy she had been the first time she had seen it rise and how she had longed for it through the dark days when she had lain buried beneath the snow on the mountainside.
    But the blazing yellow disc had come to be like a furnace glowing in the sky burning with tropical heat and she recalled that other enemy fire, that she had vanquished. She recognised in this blazing star that had once been her friend a force stronger than herself.
    At first she resisted, for even though she had lost those dearest to her, she was filled with love of life. Lonely though she was in this vast emptiness, she was still glad to see the colours in the sky at dusk, or watch the yellow moon rise from the rim of the ocean, to greet a bird winging its solitary way across the wastes of water or to try to count the stars that spangled the heavens at night.
    But more and more she realised her strength and will were ebbing and that she must soon depart.

    Then came the day when the sun beating out of a brazen sky appeared to concentrate its strength and power on her alone. Snowflake knew that she could resist no longer and that her time was come.
    And she was frightened.
    For she felt that she was being drawn upward from the sea, that the liquid life she had so loved was being drained from her, and that soon she would not be any more.
    And in those last moments, her