"That's well jumpt, thou nimble old man."

thoughts, the emotions of these hours I could never afterwards recall. Chagrin there was, the most bitter I have ever known, an overwhelming mortification and self-condemnation that I had all along been deceived with such childish ease, that I had been powerless to offer any hindrance or resistance to the endless resourcefulness of that brilliant little man. And then I would think of Mrs Dansby-Gregg, and of Margaret bound and hostage and afraid and looking at Smallwood in the dim light of that lurching tractor cabin, looking at Smallwood and the gun in Smallwood's hand, and with that thought anger would flood in to supplant the chagrin, a consuming hatred and a fury that flamed throughout my entire being, but even that anger wasn't all exclusive: it couldn't be, not so long as fear, a fear such as I had never before known, was the dominating factor in my mind. And it was. It was, too, I should think, in Zagero's mind. He hadn't spoken a word since Mrs Dansby-Gregg had died, had just flung himself uncaringly, ruthlessly, into what had to be done. Head bowed, he plodded on like an automaton. I wondered how many times he must have regretted that impetuous slip of the tongue when he had betrayed to Smallwood the fact that Solly Levin was his father. And Jackstraw was as silent as we were, non-committal, speaking only when he had to, keeping his thoughts strictly to himself. I wondered if he was blaming me for what had happened but I didn't think so, Jackstraw's mind just didn't work that way. I could guess what he was thinking, I knew the explosive temper that slumbered under that placid exterior. Had we met an unarmed Smallwood and Corazzini then, I do not think we would have stopped short of killing him with our hands. I suppose, too, that we were all three of us exhausted as we had never been before, frost-bitten, bleeding, thirsty and steadily weakening from lack of food. I say 'suppose', because logic and reason tell me that these things must have been so. But if they were I do not think they touched the minds of any of us that night. We were no longer ourselves, we were outside ourselves. Our bodies were but machines to serve the demands of our minds, and our minds so consumed with anxiety and anger that there was no place left for any further thought. We were following the tractor. We could, I suppose, have turned back in the hope of stumbling across Hillcrest and his men. I knew Hillcrest well enough to know that he would know that those who had taken over our tractorhe had no means of knowing who they were, for all he casio digital cameras compare knew Zagero might have suddenly overpowered uswould never dare make for Uplavnik but would almost certainly head for the coast. The likelihood was that Hillcrest, too, would head for the Kangalak fjordtogether with a small bay beside it, the Kangalak fjord was the only break, the only likely rendezvous in a hundred miles of cliff-bound coastand he could go there arrow-straight: on board his Sno-Cat he had a test prototype of a new, compact and as yet unmarketed Arma gyroscope specially designed for land use which had proved to have such astonishing accuracy that navigation on the ice-cap, as a problem, had ceased to exist for him. But, even should he be heading towards the coast, our chances of meeting him in that blizzard did not exist, and if we once passed them by we would have been lost for ever. Better by far to head for the coast, where some patrolling ship or plane might just possibly pick us upif we ever got there. Besides, I knew that both Jackstraw and Zagero felt exactly as I didunder a pointless but overpowering compulsion to follow Smallwood and Corazzini until'we dropped in our tracks. And the truth was that we couldn't have gone any other way even had we wished to. When Smallwood had dropped us off we had been fairly into the steadily deepening depression in the ice-cap that wound down to the Kangalak glacier and it was a perfect drainage channel for the katabatic wind that was pouring down off the plateau. Although powerful enough already when we had been abandoned, that wind was now blowing with the force of a full gale, and for the first time on the Greenland ice-plateaualthough we were now, admittedly, down to a level of 1500 feet -1 heard a wind where the deep ululating moaning was completely absent. It howled, instead, howled and shrieked like a hurricane in the upper works and rigging of a ship, and it carried with it a numbing bruising flying wall of snow and ice against which progress would have been utterly impossible. So we went the only way we could, with the lash of the storm ever on our bent and aching backs. And ache our backs did. Only three peopleZagero, Jackstraw and myselfwere able to carry anything more than their own weight: and we had among us three people completely unable to walk. Mahler was still unconscious, still in coma, but I didn't think we would have him with us very much longer: Zagero carried him for hour after endless hour through that white