Posted by andyb on March 08, 2009 at 10:09:59 user beardbiter.
In Reply to: Yesterday's Guardian posted by PeterWillis on March 08, 2009 at 08:44:42:
The lake was frozen. "Anybody could see what was going to happen. A thick grey cloud hung over the tops of the hills, and from side to side between them at the southern end of the lake. It was like looking at a different world, to glance from the sunlit, shining slopes of the snow mountains, to that soft grey curtain that seemed to hang across the lake," wrote Arthur Ransome, in his 1933 children's classic Winter Holiday. "I believe it's snow," says Dorothea and her brother Dick, anxious to imitate the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen and sail a sledge over the frozen lake says "Wind, too."
He gets the sail up and the sledge starts to slide away. After a desperate scramble, he gets aboard, and at that moment the first snowflakes reach them. "Grey, ghostly tiny figures of skaters making for the shore disappeared. The hills on the other side of the lake vanished. The Beckfoot promontory was gone. Far up the lake a patch of sunshine showed on the tops of the snow mountains. A second later even the mountains had disappeared. Dick and Dorothea on their sledge, with the sail bellying out in front of them, and the little yellow quarantine flag flying straight out before the masthead, were alone in a thick cloud of driving, hurrying snow. They could see nothing at all except snowflakes and a few yards of ice sliding away beneath them as the big wind that had come with the snow drove them up the lake like a dead leaf."