The ice on a frozen lake is not uniformly thick, even in our climate. If you think you can cross Lake Balaton in winter – on foot, without getting wet – you are accepting a duel with Fate. Especially with our climatic conditions.
Only one feat would be more amazing: crossing in summer.
On foot. Without getting wet.

What is Balaton’s surface looking at? God fixed its gaze on the Sun. A water surface observatory. An ice surface. A radar whose surface sometimes roughens and sometimes hardens; she’s been watching the neighbors upstairs for hundreds of thousands of years, and she knows everything about them.

Beauty and mortal fright.

The boys had wandered all over this tiny Greenland, with tiny sledges and with metal pipes in their hands, to check the fragility of the ice. Darkness was shining over the snow so much that it was as if there was a Soot-sun shining black.

Where to pitch the tent? There is no protection against the cruel wind. They installed their metal pipes in the ice and poured their drinking water on the pipes to freeze them to the ground. They froze over. Then they could tether the green tent and place the red sleeping bag inside: the only warm spot in the frost and in their dreams. Like a waving, red sail on the ice. As if it was waving at high speed, as if the ice was slipping away to nothingness: night slips away to past, day slips away to present.

They lay inside the red bag, pulled up the tent zip and readied their jack-knife near at hand; if there was a sudden blast of wind, there would not be time to look for and pull the zip: they would have to cut themselves out. The knife is also ice-cold.

Six hundred square kilometres of ice is moaning, wailing, screaming-snarling, singing below – soprano-flute and crater-bass. Musing rumbles, cracking groans. The boys lie tense; memories of the day’s sunrise and fear of the night are mingling in their veins. They had no idea if anyone had yet been crazy enough to lie in a tent in the middle of the ice at night – someone who was curious enough, someone to witness the exotic journey, someone to tell the others. Later on, when they reached the shore, they faced the fact that the ice moves even in the hardest frost. There are strange waters bubbling in the lake:  invisible rivers and streams inside criss-crossing each other, as if the water were living out a dramatic, emotional life, or – rather less poetically – as if its great guts were rumbling. There are currents, memories, fish bubbling and bouncing against each other deep inside.