This, I thought, death's dreadful conception of a dreadful world, must have been what had chilled the hearts and souls of our far-off Nordic ancestors when life's last tide slowly ebbed and they had tortured their failing minds with fearful imaginings of a bleak and bitter hell of eternal cold.

He drew the cloak closer around him - a human gesture made from force of habit, for this ephemeral fabric, spun of memory, would never be sufficient to protect him from death's eternal cold.

But a hell not of our latter-day imagining, a strictly Eastern and Biblical conception, but the hell of our ancient North-European ancestors, of the Vikings, the Danes, the Jutes, of Beowulf and the monster-haunted meres-the hell of eternal cold.

In Norse mythology, a hrímthurs (Old Norse "rime thurs") is any one of the particular tribe of Giants who are made of ice and inhabit Niflheim, a land of eternal cold.

Their scientists told them the end of the world, seconds away, would be followed by an eternal cold.

Would the sun disappear completely, engulfing the surface in an eternal darkness and eternal cold?

Their thick pelts protected them from the eternal cold, and they could go as long as 20 days without water.

Who lets so fair a house fall to decay, Which husbandry in honour might uphold, Against the stormy gusts of winter's day And barren rage of death's eternal cold?

Stoner hovered inside the alien crypt, utterly spent, feeling the eternal cold of infinity congealing around him, turning him to lead.

One warm face forever pinned toward Ra, the other staring blank and frozen into the eternal cold: tidelocked.