In the next two hours they covered less than a kilometre. Tim, driving Sno-Cat 2, could see only a few metres ahead; he had to send Colin out in front, roped to the nose of the Sno-Cat, to guide him. After fifteen minutes Colin was too numb to continue; and Max Wilhelm took his place; then Terry. It was soon impossible to hold to a straight line, and Tim had to rely on an uncertain compass to bring them back on course after each detour. The surface was softer than it had been on the other side of the ridge, and the Sno-Cat laboured in low gear. Tim tried to keep out of the hollows, where they were likely to bog down, but the rises weren’t much better.
At 2200 he called Carter. “This is ridiculous,” he shouted hoarsely into the microphone. “We’ve got to stop, Carter. I’m gonna burn out my transmission at this rate.”
“Okay, Tim. We’ll start up again at 0600. Everybody — keep your engines running tonight.”
No one got much sleep. The wind and the hammering of the diesels were incessant, and each vehicle had to be refuelled to keep the engines going. It was almost a relief to get up for breakfast at 0500, and Penny even volunteered to help refuel the Nodwell before they got underway. The wind took her breath away, and she could scarcely move against it; wrestling the drum of diesel fuel off the sledge was torture, even with help from Herm and Don. By the time they got back inside, the oily stink of the cabin was like the perfume of tropical flowers to her.
The blizzard had weakened a little, and it was possible to see as much as twenty metres ahead. Tim led off again, and had actually got up to a speed of three kilometres per hour when Sean McNally reported that the Nodwell had lost its sledge. By the time the tow rope was secured, the blizzard was blowing with full force again, and everything came to a frustrated halt.
For the rest of that day, July 7, the engines idled but nothing moved except the snow and the wind. Carter sat in his wanigan and computed fuel consumption. Others played cards, slept, read and waited for mealtimes. Late that afternoon Katerina examined everyone in the Nodwell. The men all showed a slight rise in blood pressure, and everyone had headaches. She suspected carbon monoxide might be leaking into the cabin, and ordered the back door opened every twenty minutes.
“Oh, come on, Katerina,” Ray protested. “It’s just the damn noise and inactivity. Why should we freeze as well?”
“Do not argue!” Katerina snapped. Then she rubbed her face and sighed. “I am sorry. We are all irritable. I wish we were moving, too.”
The storm ended at midnight; half an hour later the convoy set out again. The sky was clearing rapidly, and a haloed moon shone through the clouds. Will, in Sno-Cat 1, led them for eight uneventful kilometres, and when they stopped for breakfast everyone was tired but cheerful. Refuelling was relatively easy with no wind to fight, and they were on their way again by 0500. Almost at once they encountered the edges of a sastrugi field, but managed to keep going for over an hour before the sastrugi became too high and steep to negotiate.
Carter stood in the cab of Sno-Cat 1 with Will, looking at the sastrugi glittering in the headlights. He shook his head and got on the radio to the D4.
“Tom, tell Gordon and Roger to get off their duffs and make a run to Grid South. If the sastrugi keep on going after four kilometres, they can come back and try in the other direction.”
An hour later they were back: the sastrugi extended as far as they had ventured to Grid South. The reconnaissance toward Grid North, however, soon turned up a gap in the field.
“It’ll be rough,” Gordon warned. “But we oughta be able to make it.”
It was very rough. The vehicles heaved and lurched and skidded for hours over a surface little better than a tank trap. Around 1500 Sno-Cat 2 lost its right tread. Tom and Howie managed to repair it, but it took them three hours in a rising wind that carried drift as fine and sharp as ground glass. They had to work with their mitts off, and the cold bit easily through their wool gloves. Katerina treated them for frostbitten fingers and noses, but they seemed otherwise all right.
“We’re not stopping for dinner,” Carter announced as the convoy started up again. “I want us out of these sastrugi before the real storm hits.”
It didn’t happen. By 1930 hours the vehicles were bogged down in another blizzard with sastrugi all around them. There they sat for the rest of the night, and the next day, and a second night. On the morning of July 9 the blizzard ended and the temperature dropped from -20° to -45°C in less than an hour.
The convoy was heavily drifted over. To save fuel, engines had been turned off during the first night of the blizzard, and all were now frozen solid. Most of the day was spent in digging the vehicles out and getting the engines started. Ben Whitcumb was outside for hours, the flamethrower strapped to his back as he went from one vehicle to the next; snow vaporised in the orange tongue of the flamethrower and froze on his clothes in a thickening crust of ice. When all the engines were going, he went back to his wanigan. It took him several hours to warm up again.
The convoy finally moved out a little after 1600. The sastrugi were still there, hidden under the drifts, and the Nodwell bucked and swayed violently. After three long hours Sean handed the controls over to Penny and went aft for a mug of tea. At first she was terrified, but the driving soon became almost enjoyable. There was a knack to getting over sastrugi without losing either momentum or a tread — and a knack to recognising when to steer right around a really bad stretch. Fortunately, the Nodwell was near the end of the convoy, and could follow the packed-down trail left by the bulldozers.
“Sean, how’s your fuel consumption?” Carter asked over the radio. Penny reached for the mike.
“Not so good, Carter. We’ve used half a tank in the last three hours.”
“That Penny?”
“Hi.”
“Hi yourself. Are you driving?”
“Sure. Look, Ma, no hands.”
The loudspeaker crackled with eavesdroppers’ comments, most of them unimaginative variations on the theme of the woman driver. Then Steve came on.
“You’ve doing damn well, Penny. Just don’t push that thing too hard.”
“And watch your fuel gauge,” Carter added.
“Okay.” She hung up the microphone, feeling very pleased with herself.
The convoy finally got through the sastrugi field, but by then it was 0500 the next morning, July 10. They had travelled a total of about fifty kilometres since leaving Laputa, but only about thirty had been made in actual progress towards Outer Willy. Carter promised them that they would make better time as their sledges’ burden of fuel drums grew lighter, but Penny suspected that the weather and surface would continue to slow them down.
She was right. All that day the convoy floundered through snow as fine and dry as talcum powder; even the weight of the D8 scarcely packed it down, and it seemed bottomless. A steady breeze from Grid West threw drift across their course and cut visibility to less than half a kilometre. By 1800, after nearly twenty-four hours of continuous travel, the convoy had covered about sixteen kilometres.
The Nodwell stopped between the two Sno-Cats. Penny, Herm and Don went outside to pump fuel into all three vehicles. It was exhausting work, struggling with the drums and manually pumping the fuel out of them. When the job was finished, Steve invited Penny over for supper.
The wanigan was like a miniature A-frame, four metres long and two metres wide and high. The interior was small and cramped: thick batts of fibreglass insulation were stapled to the walls, and more lay under the plywood floor. A tiny loft was packed with food boxes, tools and batteries that powered a small lamp, a heater and the radio. There was no headroom.