As o'er the cold sepulcher stone

my face collided with the slatted sides of the instrument shelter, then jumped for the hatch, sliding down to the floor of the cabin on back and arms without bothering to use the steps. Joss, already completely clad in his furs but with the hood of his parka hanging over his shoulders, was just emerging from the food and fuel tunnel which led off from the other end of the cabin, his arms loaded with equipment. "Grab all the warm clothing you can find, Joss," I told him quickly. I was trying to think as quickly and coherently as I was talking, to figure out everything that we might require, but it wasn't easy, that intense cold numbed the mind almost as much as it did the body. "Sleeping-bags, blankets, spare coats, shirts, it doesn't matter whose they are. Shove them into a couple of gunny sacks." "You think they're going to land, sir?" Curiosity, anticipation, horroreach struggled for supremacy in the thin, dark intelligent face. "You really think so?" "I think they're going to try. What have you got there?" "Fire bombs, a couple of Pyrenes." He dumped them by the stove. "Hope they're not solid." "Good boy. And a couple of the tractor extinguishersthe Nu-Swifts, G-1000,1 think." A great help these little things are going to be, I thought, if several thousand gallons of petrol decide to go up in flames. "Fire axes, crowbars, canes, the homing spoolfor heaven's sake don't forget the hojning spooland the searchlight battery. Be sure and wrap that up well." "Bandages?" "No need. Seventy degrees of frost will freeze blood and seal a wound quicker than any bandage. But bring the morphia kit. Any water in these two buckets?" "Full. But more ice than water." "Put them on the stoveand don't forget to turn out the stove and both the lights before you leave." Incongruously enough, we who could survive in the Arctic only by virtue of fire, feared it above all else. "Pile the rest of the stuff up by the instrument shelter." I found Jackstraw, working only by the feeble light of his torch, outside the lean-to drift-walled shelter that we had built for the dogs from empty packing cases and an old tractor tarpaulin. He appeared to be fighting a losing battle in the centre of a milling pack of snarling yelping dogs, but the appearance was illusion only: already he had four of the dogs off the tethering cable and the sledge tracelines snapped into their harness. "How's it coming?" jvc digital video camera driver d I shouted. "Easy." I could almost see the crinkling grin behind the snow-mask. "I caught most of them asleep, and Balto is a great helphe's in a very bad temper at being woken up." Balto was Jackstraw's lead doga huge, 90-pound, half-wolf, half-Siberian, direct descendant of, and named for the famous dog that had trekked with Amundsen, and who later, in the terrible winter of '25, his sledge-driver blind behind him, had led his team through driving blizzards and far sub-zero cold to bring the life-giving anti-toxin into the diphtheria-stricken town of Nome, Alaska. Jackstraw's Balto was another such: powerful, intelligent, fiercely loyal to his master- although not above baring his wolfs fangs as he made a token pass at him from time to time -and, above all, like all good lead dogs, a ruthless disciplinarian with his team-mates. He was exercising that disciplinary authority nowsnarling, pushing and none-too-gently nipping the recalcitrant and the slow-coaches, quelling insubordination in its earliest infancy. "I'll leave you to it, then. I'll get the searchlight." I made off towards the mound of snow that loomed high to the westward of the cabin, broke step and listened. There was no sound to be heard, nothing but the low-pitched moan of the wind on the ice-cap, the eternal rattling of the anemometer cups. I turned back to Jackstraw, my face bent against the knifing wind. "The planehave you heard the plane, Jackstraw? I can't hear a thing." Jackstraw straightened, pulled off his parka hood and stood still, hands cupped to his ears. Then he shook his head briefly and replaced the hood. "My God!" I looked at him. "Maybe they've crashed already." Again the shake of the head. "Why not?" I demanded. "On a night like this you wouldn't hear a thing if they crashed half a mile downwind." "I'd have felt it, Dr Mason." I nodded slowly, said nothing. He was right, of course. The frozen surface of this frozen land transmitted vibration like a tuning-fork. Last July, seventy miles inland, we had distinctly felt the vibration of the ice-cap as an iceberg had broken off from a glacier in a hanging valley and toppled into the fjord below. Maybe the pilot had lost his bearings, maybe he was flying in