Shakily, I rose to my feet. It was then I realised for the first time that I had lost my snow-mask – it must have ripped off as I had rolled along the ground. I brought out my torch from under my parka – it was always kept there as even a dry battery could freeze and give no light at all if the temperature fell low enough – and probed around in the darkness. But there was no sign of it, the wind could have carried it a hundred yards away by this time. A bad business, indeed, but there was no help for it. I didn't like to think what my face would be like by the time I arrived back at the cabin.
Joss and Jackstraw were still trying to quieten the dogs when I rejoined them.
"You all right, sir?" Joss asked. He took a step closer. "Good lord, you've lost your mask!"
"I know. It doesn't matter." It did matter, for already I could feel the burning sensation in my throat and lungs every time I breathed. "Did you get a bearing on that plane?"
"Roughly. Due east, I should say."
"Jackstraw?"
"A little north of east, I think." He stretched out his hand, pointing straight into the eye of the wind.
"We'll go east." Somebody had to make the decision, somebody had to be wrong, and it might as well be me. "We'll go east – Joss, how long is that spool?"
"Four hundred yards. More or less."
"So. Four hundred yards, then due north. That plane is bound to have left tracks in the snow: with luck, we'll cut across them. Let's hope to heaven it did touch down less than four hundred yards from here."
I took the end of the line from the spool, went to the nearest antenna pole, broke off the four-foot-long flag-like frost feathers – weird growths of the crystal aggregates of rime that streamed out almost horizontally to leeward – and made fast the end of the line round the pole. I really made it fast – our lives depended on that line, and without it we could never find our way back to the antenna, and so eventually to the cabin, through the pitch-dark confusion of that gale-ridden arctic night. There was no possibility of retracing steps through the snow: in that intense cold, the rime-crusted snow was compacted into a frozen neve that was but one degree removed from ice, of an iron-hard consistency that would show nothing less than the crimp marks of a five-ton tractor.
We started off at once, with the wind almost in our faces, but slightly to the left. I was in the lead, Jackstraw came behind with the dogs and Joss brought up the rear, unreeling the line from the homing spool against the pressure of the return winding spring.
Without my mask, that blinding suffocating drift was a nightmare, a cruel refinement of contrasting torture where the burning in my throat contrasted with the pain of my freezing face for dominance in my mind. I was coughing constantly in the super-chilled air, no matter how I tried to cover mouth and nose with a gloved hand, no matter how shallowly I breathed to avoid frosting my lungs.
The devil of it was, shallow breathing was impossible. We were running now, running as fast as the ice-glazed slipperiness of the surface and our bulky furs would allow, for to unprotected people exposed to these temperatures, to that murderous drift-filled gale, life or death was simply a factor of speed, of the duration of exposure. Maybe the plane had ripped open or broken in half, catapulting the survivors out on to the ice-cap – if there were any survivors: for them, either immediate death as the heart failed in the near impossible task of adjusting the body to an instantaneous change of over 100° F, or death by exposure within five minutes. Or maybe they were all trapped inside slowly freezing. How to get at them? How to transport them all back to the cabin? But only the first few to be taken could have any hope. And even if we did get them all back, how to feed them – for our own supplies were already dangerously low? And where, in heaven's name, were we going to put them all?
Jackstraw's shout checked me so suddenly that I stumbled and all but fell. I turned back, and Joss came running up.
"The end of the line?" I asked.
He nodded, flashed a torch in my face. "Your nose and cheek -both gone. They look bad."
Gloves off, I kneaded my face vigorously with my mittened hands until I felt the blood pounding painfully back, then took the old jersey which Jackstraw dug out from a gunny sack and wrapped it round my face. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing.
We struck off to the north, with the wind on our right cheeks -1 had no option but to gamble on the hope that the wind had neither backed nor veered – our torches probing the ground in front of us, stopping every fifteen or twenty feet to drive a pointed bamboo marker into the frozen ground. We had covered fifty yards without sighting anything, and I was just beginning to become convinced that we must still be well to the west of the plane's touchdown point and wondering what in the world we should do next when we almost literally stumbled into an eighteen inch deep, ten foot wide depression in the snow-crust of the ice-cap.
This was it, no question about that. By a one in a hundred chance we had hit on the very spot where the plane had touched down – or crashed down, if the size of the depression in that frozen snow were anything to go by. To the left, the west, the ground was virginal, unmarked – ten feet to that side and we should have missed it altogether. To the east, the deep depression shelved rapidly upwards, its smooth convexity now marred by two large gouge marks, one in the centre and one to the right of the track, as if a pair of gigantic ploughs had furrowed through the ground: part of the under fuselage must have been ripped open by the impact -it would have been a wonder had it not been. Some way farther to the east, and well to the right of the main track, two other grooves, parallel and of a shallow bowl shape, had been torn in the snow. The gouge marks, plainly, of the still-racing propellers: the plane must have tilted over on its right wing just after the moment of landing.
To see all this took no longer than to sweep a torch through a swift semi-circle. I shouted to Joss to take another bundle of canes and prop up the Homing spool line that led back to the antenna– if this weren't done it would drift over and be lost to sight in ten minutes– and then rejoin us: then I turned and ran after Jackstraw who had already urged his team forwards and eastwards along the track of the crashed plane.
The wind was worse than ever, the drift an almost solid wall that reduced our speed to a lurching stumble and forced us to lean far into it to maintain our balance. Two hundred yards, three hundred, and then, almost a quarter of a mile from where it had touched down we found the airliner simply by walking straight into it. It had slewed almost 90 degrees as it had come to a halt, and was lying square across its own path, still resting on even keel.
In the feeble light of my torch the airliner, even although its fuselage rested on the ground, seemed immensely high and to stretch away for a vast distance on either side, but for all its great size there was something peculiarly pathetic and forlorn about it. But this, of course, was purely subjective, the knowledge in my own mind that this crippled giant would never leave here again.
I could hear no movement, see no movement. High above my head a faint blue light seemed to glow behind some of the cabin windows but apart from that there was no sign of life at all.
CHAPTER TWO – Monday 1 A.M. – 2 A.M.
My greatest fear had already proved groundless – there was no sign of fire anywhere, no flickering red to see, no hidden crackling to hear. It was still possible that some small tongue of flame was creeping along inside the fuselage or wings looking for the petrol or oil that would help it blaze into destructive life – and with that wind to fan the flames, destruction would have been complete -but it hardly seemed worth worrying about: and it was unlikely that any pilot cool-headed enough to turn off the ignition would have forgotten to shut down the petrol lines.