What metaphors are used in The White Horses of Vienna by Kay Boyle?

Boyle uses the coldness of the mountains as a metaphor for the way the peasant Nazi sympathizers react to Heine..... the coldness enacted toward "his own people."

"He was lost in this wilderness of cold, lost in a warm month, and the thought turned his blood to ice. He wanted to be indoors, with the warmth of his own people, and the intellect speaking. He had had enough of the bare, northern speech of these others. . ."