"If the Bishop he doth take me,

butterfly nuts. In these latitudes, quick-release was a misnomer: the nuts invariably froze after even the briefest exposure. The accepted practice was to remove one's gloves and close mittened hands round the nuts until body heat warmed and expanded them enough to permit unscrewing. But there was no time for that tonight: I tapped the bolts with a spanner from the tool box and the steel pins, made brittle by the intense cold, sheared as if made from the cheapest cast iron. I crawled out at the foot of the tarpaulin, searchlight clutched under one arm, and as soon as I straightened I heard it againthe roar of aero engines, closing rapidly. They sounded very near, very low, but I wasted no time trying to locate the plane. Head lowered against the wind and the needle-sharp lances of the flying ice, I felt rather than saw my way back to the cabin hatch and was brought up short by Jackstraw's steadying hand. He and Joss were busy loading equipment aboard the sledge and lashing it down, and as I stooped to help them something above my head fizzled and spluttered into a blinding white .re that threw everything into a harsh black and white relief of frozen snow and impenetrable shadow. Joss, remembering what I had completely forgottenthat dousing our cabin lights would have robbed the pilot of his beaconhad ignited a magnesium flare in the slats of the instrument shelter. We all turned as the plane came into our vision again, to the south, and it was at once apparent why we had lost all sight and sound of it. The pilot must have made a figure of eight turn out in the darkness, had reversed his approach circle, and was flying from east to west less than two hundred feet up, undercarriage still retracted, it passed within a couple of hundred yards of us like some monstrous bird. Both headlights were now dipped, the twin beams a glitter of kaleidoscopic light in the ice-filled darkness of the sky, the twin oval pools of light interlocking now and very bright, racing neck and neck across the snow. And then these pools, increasing as rapidly in size as they diminished in strength, slipped away to the left as the plane banked sharply to the right and came curving round clockwise to the north. I knew now what the pilot was intending and my hands clenched helplessly inside mittens and gloves. But there was nothing I could do about this. "The antenna!" I shouted. "Follow out the line of the antenna." I stooped and gave the sledge its initial shove as Jackstraw shouted at Balto. Joss was by my side, head close to mine. "What's manual sakar digital camera 28690 happening? Why are we" "He's coming down this time. I'm sure of it. To the north." "The north?" Not even the snow-mask could hide the horror in his voice. "He'll kill himself. He'll kill all of them. The hummocks" "I know." The land to the north-east was broken and uneven, the ice raised up by some quirk of nature into a series of tiny hillocks, ten, twenty feet high, tiny but the only ones within a hundred miles. "But he's going to do it, all the same. A belly landing with the wheels up. That's why he reversed his circle. He wants to land upwind to give himself the minimum stalling ground speed." "He could land to the south, into the wind." Joss sounded almost desperate. "It's a billiard table there." "He could, but he won't." I had to shout the words to make myself heard above the wind. "He's nobody's fool. He knows if he lands to windward of us, even a hundred yards to windward, the chances of finding our lights, our cabin, in this weather just don't exist. He's got to land upwind. He's just got to." There was a long silence as we staggered forward, head and shoulders bent almost to waist ievel against the wind and ice-filled drift, then Joss moved close again. "Maybe he'll see the hummocks in time. Maybe he can" "He'll never see them," I said flatly. "Flying into this stuff he can't possibly see a hundred yards in front of him." The radio antenna, rime-coated now to almost fifty times its normal size, sagging deeply and swaying pendulum-like in the wind between each pair of fourteen-foot poles that supported it, stretched away almost 250 feet to the north. We were following the line of this, groping our way blindly from pole to pole and almost at the end of the line, when the roar of the aircraft engines, for the last few seconds no more than a subdued murmur in the night as the wind carried the sound from us, suddenly swelled and increased to a deafening crescendo as I shouted a warning to the others and flung myself flat on the ground: the huge dark shape of the airliner swept directly over us even as I fell. I would have sworn, at the time, that I could have reached out and touched it with my hand, but it must have cleared us by at least ten feetthe antenna poles, we later discovered, were undamaged. Like a fool, I immediately leapt to my feet to try to get a bearing on