The Mystery of the Jasper Dome The sun sat low, a cold pale yellow eye, peering helplessly upon the town of Jasper. At first, it was a wonder, a vision born from childhood dreams of cities made of ice and snow so deep that tunnels ran from house to house and door to door in one long continuous frozen archway. But the wonder soon caved in to fear when we saw no chimney smoke above the drifts, heard no hum from homeowned generators. There was no sign of movement but the shadow of the clouds sliding silently across the surface of the snow. It was rare for any storm to dump so much snow upon so small a plot of land, as if the valley had been singled out for reasons known only to the sky above. We grabbed our shovels just the same and began to dig, carving tiny niches in the hard-packed crystals. But only hours into the rescue, we knew nothing could survive the freezing cold, let alone the weight of a hundred winter snowfalls packed into one. So we waited. We waited for the snow to thaw, to give up its hold and let us tend to the frozen dead. But as the months came and went, each one warmer than the one before, still the snow survived. Meteorologists contended that the valley and its bowl of concentrated cold had reached an equilibrium of some undetermined kind, which brought a pilgrimage of thousands to the site. The curious, the devout, each chipped pieces of the ice sent from the heavens. Some took to lighting fires, others drilling rabbit holes. But nothing seemed to spoil the purity of the snow. Now years have passed and the Jasper Dome, as it is better known, still stands intact, ten times the size of any football stadium, the permanent residence to seven hundred sixty seven souls left frozen in their beds. Religious scholars from around the world have debated what the number means. Is it a foretelling of
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