and, sure enough, it was a dragon a great, shining, winged, scaly, clawy, big-mouthed dragon made of pure ice. it must have gone to sleep curled around the hole where the warm steam used to come up from the middle of the earth, and then when the earth got colder, and the column of steam froze and was turned into the north pole, the dragon must have got frozen in his sleep frozen too hard to move and there he stayed.