The squirrels in their silver fur will fall

reach a hurricane force of destructive violence in which nothing could live. And all the signs, all the conditions for a gravity storm were there. The recent extreme cold, the -rising wind, the rising temperature, the outward flowing direction of the wind, the dark star-obscuring clouds scudding by overheadthere could be no mistaking it, Jackstraw declared. I had never known him to be wrong about Greenland weather, I didn't believe him to be wrong now, and when Jackstraw became nervous it was time for even the most optimistic to start worrying. And I was worried all right. We drove the tractor to its limit, and on the slight downward slopewe had changed direction by this time and were heading due south-west for Uplavnikwe were making very good time indeed. But by four o'clock in the morning, when we were, I reckoned, not more than sixty miles from Uplavnik, we ran into the sastrugi and were forced to slow down. The sastrugi, regular undulations in the frozen snow, were the devil on tractors, especially elderly machines like the Citroen. Caused by raking winds, symmetrical as the waves in an eighteenth-century sailing print, hard on the crest and soft in the trough, they made progress possible only by slowing down to a disheartening crawl. Even so the Citroen and the sledges behind rolled and pitched like ships in a heavy seaway, the headlights one moment reaching up into the lowering darkness of the sky, the next dipping to illuminate the barred white and shadowed black of the sastrugi immediately ahead. Sometimes it gave way to deceptively clear patchesdeceptively, for snow had obviously fallen here recently or been carried down from the plateau, and we were reduced to low gear to make any headway at all on it. Shortly before eight o'clock in the morning Jackstraw brought the Citroen to a halt, and as the roar of the big engine died the deep moaning of the wind, a wind carrying with it a rising wall of ice and snow, swept in to take its place. Jackstraw had drawn up broadside on to the wind and the slope of the hill and I jumped down to rig up a canvas shelter extending out from the cabin: it was nothing elaborate, just a triangular sheet of proofed canvas attached to the top of the cabin and the cleat of a caterpillar track on its vertical side, with its apex stretched out to a spike hammered into the surface of the ice-cap: there was no room for us all within the cabin at meal-times, I wanted some protection when we kept our 8 a.m. radio schedule with Hillcrest, and, in particular, it was time that Zagero and nikion 35 mm digital camera Levin had some relief from their sufferings. They had ridden all night on the tractor sled, under the guard of either Jackstraw or myself, and though the temperature was now only a few degrees below zero and though they were sheltering under a mound of clothing, nevertheless they must have spent a miserable night. Breakfast, such as it was, was waiting and ready to be eaten as soon as the tractor had stopped, but I had little appetite for it: it seemed to me I had forgotten what sleep was like, I had had none for almost three days, I was living now in a permanent state of physical and mental exhaustion and it was becoming almost impossible to concentrate, to think of the hundred and one things that had to be thought of all the time. More than once I caught myself nodding and dozing off over my cup of coffee, and it was only with a conscious effort of will that I forced myself to my feet to keep the radio schedule. I was going to call both Hillcrest and our baseHillcrest had given me the frequency the previous evening. I decided to call Hillcrest first. We got through without any difficulty, although Hillcrest said they could hear me only very faintly. I suspected some fault on the generator side, for our receiver was powered by a hundred-hour battery and we could hear Hillcrest's voice clearly. All the men except Mahler were gathered round me during the transmissionthey seemed to find a peculiar reassurance in another voicehowever distant and disembodied that voiceand even Zagero and Levin were only seven or eight feet away, sitting in front of the tractor sled with their feet still bound. I was on a canvas chair, with my back to the canvas screen, and Corazzini and Brewster were sitting on the tailboard, the canvas curtains drawn behind them to keep the heat in the cabin. The Rev. Smallwood was behind me, turning the generator handle, and Jackstraw a few feet away, watchful as ever, the cocked rifle ready in his hand. "Receiving you loud and clear," I said to Hillcrest. My hands were cupped round the microphone and I was holding it close to my mouth to cut out as much as possible of the background noise of the wind. "What progress?" I threw the receiver switch into the antenna, and Hillcrest's voice came again. "Great!" He sounded enthusiastic, excited. "My congratulations to your learned friend. Works like a charm and we're going like a bomb. We are approaching the Vindeby Nunataks and expect to be through by this