Explain the near death experience Elaine had in her childhood in Cat's Eye.

This experience comes in Chapter 35 of this excellent
novel. As a natural result of the increasingly sinister games that Cordelia and Carol
play with Elaine, where she is regularly verbally and psychologically abused by them,
the climax is reached when Cordelia throws Elaine's hat down into a very steep ravine
and commands her to go and get it and bring it back up so she can "be forgiven." At the
bottom Elaine, in reaching for the hat, breaks through the ice and as a result finds
that she is soaked by freezing water and it is very difficult for her to get out and
climb up the ravine again:

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My head is filling with black sawdust; little
specks of the darkness are getting in through my eyes. It's as if the snowflakes are
black, the way white is black on a negative. The snow has changed to tiny pellets, more
like sleet. It makes a rustling noise coming down through the branches, like the
shifting and whispering of people in a crowded room who know they must be
quiet.

What saves Elaine is
hearing a voice of a woman who comes down to her and gives Elaine the hope and energy to
get up and go home. Elaine beleives that this specteral figure is actually the Virgin
Mary, but either way she manages to get up and climb up the ravine again and reach the
top, where she meets her mother.