And gave him a curious long bow.

cheerfulness in her fully wakeful momentsshe was asleep most of the timewere strained and almost desperate. The effort was too much. There was nothing I could do for her. Like an old watch, her time was running out, the mainspring of her life running down. A day or two of this would surely kill her. Solly Levin had taken over the blow-torches which played constantly against the sides of the snow-buckets. Wrapped and huddled in clothes until only one eye was visible, he nevertheless achieved the near impossible of looking a picture of abject misery: but the way my thoughts had been running all day, I had no sympathy to waste on Mr Levin. Margaret Ross dozed by the side of the stove but I turned my eyes away quickly, even to look at that thin white face was a physical hurt. The marvel of them all was Mr Smallwood, yet another instance, I thought wryly, of how wrong I could get. Instead of being one of the first to go under, he showed every sign of being the last. Three hours ago, when I had been in the cabin, he had brought up his bag from the tractor sled, and as he'd opened it I'd caught a glimpse of a black gown and the red and purple divinity hood. He'd brought out a Bible, donned a pair of rimless steel spectacles and, for several hours now, had been reading as best he could in the dim overhead light. He seemed composed, relaxed yet alert, fit to carry on for a long time to come. As doctor and scientist I didn't go in much for theological speculation, but I could only suppose that Mr Smallwood was in some way sustained by something that was denied the rest of us. I could only envy him. During the course of the evening two blows fell. The first of these was not in any way figurative. I still have the scar on my forehead to prove it. We stopped just before eight o'clock that evening, partly in order to keep our radio schedule with Hillcrest, partlybecause I wanted to make a long halt, to give Hillcrest all the more opportunity to overtake uson the pretext that the Citroen's engine was overheating badly in the temperature that had been rising steadily since the early afternoon. But despite the fact that it was now almost twenty-five degrees warmer than in mid-afternoon, it was still bitterly coldour hunger and physical exhaustion saw to it that we still suffered almost as much as ever -dark and very still. Far away to the south-west we could see the jagged saw-tooth line of the Vindeby Nunataksthat hundred-mile long ridge of hills that we would have to cross the next daythe forbidding peaks a gleaming crystalline digital camera numbering system white in the light of the moon that had not yet topped our eastern horizon. I was driving when we stopped. I switched off the motor, walked round to the back of the tractor and told those inside that we were making a halt. I asked Margaret Ross to heat some food on the stovesoup, dried fruit, one of our four remaining tins of corned beefasked Jackstraw to rig up the antenna for the radio, then went back to the tractor, stooped and turned the radiator drainage cap, catching the liquid hi a can. Hie anti-freeze in the water had been thinned down so much in the course of the day that I was pretty certain that, in those temperatures, it wouldn't take half an hour for the radiator water to freeze up and split open the cylinder jacket. I suppose it was because of the gurgling of the water into the can that I didn't hear the sound behind me until the last moment, and even so I had no particular reason just then to be suspicious of anything. I half-straightened and turned round to see who was there, but I was too late. The consciousness of a vague blur hi the darkness and the blinding white flash of light and pain as something solid smashed into my forehead, just above the goggles on my right eye, came in one and the same instant. I was out, completely unconscious, long before I crumpled down on to the frozen surface of the ice-cap. Death could easily have supervened then. It would have been easy, ever so easy, for me to drift from unconsciousness into that numbed sleep from which, almost eighty degrees of frost in the ground, I would never have awaked. But awake I did, slowly, painfully, reluctantly, at the insistence of urgently shaking hands. "Dr Mason! Dr Mason!" Dimly I realised that it was Jackstraw speaking, that he had my head and shoulders supported in the crook of his arm. His voice was low, but with a peculiarly carrying quality. "Wake up, Dr Mason. Ah, good, good. Easy does it now, Dr Mason." Groggily, Jackstraw's strong arm helping, I levered myself up into an upright sitting position. A brilliant flame of pain lanced like a scalpel through my head, I felt everything blurring once more, consciously, almost violently, shook off the shadows that were creeping in on me again, then looked dazedly up at Jackstraw. I couldn't see very well, I thought for one frightening moment that the vision centre had been damaged when the back of my head had struck against the iron-hard ice-capthe ache there was almost as severe as the one in my