Thule Air Base had done their best with the weather forecast. The weather observation aircraft patrolling the Eastern Greenland coast and the satellite weather survey both suggested there were a few hours ahead in which winds would slacken and the weight of snowfall lessen. So off we went. The brief daylight was over, the night black and moonless, the wind getting stronger as TK4 made the long climb out of Belvoir, up to the edge of the icecap. I stuck the two front skis down to counter any awkward gusts, warmed up the motors, and we belted off into the brutal darkness. If I have sounded overconfident, even a little flip, about the TK4's performance to this point, it's not because I'm a wild optimist or full of blind faith; it's because the TK4 is a damn good machine, beautifully designed, well built and thoroughly tested and modified until she's as good as we can get her. In spite of all that, I faced the hundred-mile dash across the icecap in a very sober mood indeed. Having spent a lifetime working with machines, I know very well that mankind hasn't yet succeeded in building one that won't break down, whether it's an electric toothbrush or a Rolls-Royce car. A good watch is probably the most reliable thing there is, but for all the dustproof, waterproof casings, the jewelled movements, the technical refinement, every watch can stop, and sooner or later it does. So, sooner or later, would the TK4, but not, I prayed, within the next hundred miles, or on the icecap with me or anybody else aboard. What happened was, I suppose, testimony to the power of prayer. We'd just passed the Mile Fifty marker, after about two hours on the Trail, when I found my vision disintegrating into a mass of little flickering lights, lightning-shaped, migraine-style. I told Scott about it and he made me stop and let the engines idle. When I'd done that, he had me lie back in my seat, head dangling over the seat back.
'Now,' he said, 'just close your eyes and concentrate on looking into your head. Try to see the inside of your skull.' I obeyed meekly. It didn't seem to be doing any good, though. Then I heard a lighter scrape beside me and smelt smoke, and a cigarette was placed between my lips. 'Smoke it,' Scott said. 'Don't let your eyes move till it's finished.'
So I smoked, and tried to imagine the inside of my head, and felt my eye muscles begin to ache. When I could feel the cigarette's heat on my fingers, Scott said, 'Okay. Now try opening your eyes.'
I did, and raised my head, and promptly felt dizzy. But when the dizziness cleared, after a couple of rather sickening minutes, my vision was clear, too.
'Thanks,' I said. 'Who thought that one up?'
'Folklore,' Scott said. 'Handed down driver to driver through the long, long generations. Sure works, though.'
'It sure does,' I said. And we were off again as soon as I'd retracted the TK4's feet. Five miles later we went past the Swing like a bee buzzing past a beetle, exchanging headlight greetings, but not stopping. The wind got up a bit more, and for the last twenty miles the TK4 took rather more holding straight. We veered a bit, but no more than we might driving on an exposed road in strong winds, and then the marker flags ceased to flow at us in a straight line, and guided us round the approach into Camp Hundred. The trip had taken three hours twenty minutes, including the stop for impromptu eye treatment, and I was feeling pleased with myself, the TK4 and the world in general.
But I was also tired after all the concentration, and not particularly anxious to meet Smales that night. As soon as the TK4 was safely parked in the traction shed, I left the unloading of the portable generator in Reilly's big and capable hands and went off to bed where, despite the pail of weariness that hung over my mind, or perhaps because of it, I couldn't get to sleep and lay in the darkness, while the sheets gradually wrinkled themselves and imaginary corrugations developed in the mattress and I became progressively more uncomfortable. Finally, I switched on the light and lit a cigarette, and reached for the novel I'd started a few days earlier. I read for perhaps an hour, not taking in anything much, but forcing myself to keep going until, with my eyelids feeling like heavy steel shutters just waiting to clang down, I put out the last cigarette, stopped resisting gravity, let my eyes close and drifted off. I must have been down very deep because, though I was coughing, it didn't waken me, at any rate not immediately. When I did click into consciousness I was really coughing hard, almost choking and feeling dizzy, and there was an acrid smell of fumes in the air. I reached for the light switch, turned it on, but there was no light. A glance at the luminous hands of my watch told me it was 3 a.m., but that luminosity was all I could see. Meanwhile there was fire somewhere, though I could see no flame, and since the hut was wooden, I'd better get out of it quick. I began to fumble round in the dark, between cough spasms, trying to find the clothes I'd thrown round when I went to bed, and found some, but not all; in particular, I couldn't find trousers, and the thought of going out into the icy tunnels without them, fire or no fire, smoke or no smoke, wasn't attractive. Then my hand struck my book of matches, knocking them, naturally, to the floor, where I had to get down on my hands and knees and feel across the shiny linoleum for them. If anything I was coughing even harder, gasping for breath and beginning to feel woozy, and I broke two of the three remaining matches before I got the third one lit. By its light I saw smoke hanging in the air, but I'd known that it was there and I wasted no time looking at it, and concentrated instead on finding my trousers, socks and boots. Then I dressed hurriedly and with increasing difficulty, not bothering overmuch with buttons, zips or snap fasteners, because my head felt light and seemed ready to float away from me and it was as much as I could do to dress at all. When I tried to walk I lurched and fell and was violently sick, gasping and retching as I lay on the floor. I knew I was close to passing out, and what was worse, I'd lost all sense of direction. There were four walls in the room and I didn't know which held the door. My arms and legs were like collapsing balloons, my head was hardly there at all, and where the willpower came from, I don't know, but somehow I forced myself up on to my knees, felt for the edge of the bed, got some idea of my bearings, and set off across a million miles of linoleum for the door. About half-way, I thought I was going to pass out in the middle of the floor and die, and I remember that I no longer even cared. But then my knee landed on something pointed, a nail head sticking up through the linoleum, and the sudden sharp pain refocused my senses long enough to get me to the door, to find the handle, to turn it...
The handle turned, but the door did not move. I remember the dim hopelessness of the moment, hearing a weird distorted voice mumble the word 'locked', then another racking cough spasm that doubled me over . . , and suddenly the door was open and I was tumbling forward, somersaulting from the two-step-high level of the hut floor to the granulated ice crystals in the trench. There was precious little breath in my body, but the fall knocked what there was out of me, and I may or may not have blacked out for a second or two. Then I was gasping and coughing, lying among all that crystalline ice, but feeling cold air flood into my aching lungs. With my mind clearing, I realized why the door had appeared to be locked. It was because the Americans made doors that opened outwards, not inwards in the British fashion. Gradually I began to feel better. Not much better, but a little. My head ached fiercely, my lungs and stomach felt like half-perished rubber and the same rubbery, chemical flavour lay thickly in my mouth.
Also I was still in darkness. I sat up and got a whiff of smoke that made me cough again. Since the smoke must be coming from inside the hut, I must close the door. Getting to my feet started another spasm of giddiness and I sat down heavily, waited a few moments, breathing cautiously, then tried again. This time there was less giddiness; I swayed, but remained upright. After a minute or so, I stretched my arms out in front of me and began trying to feel my way towards something that would give me a basis for orientation. The snow wall didn't, and it was the first thing I encountered. Damn! The next was the other snow wall. I stood in the black cold, trying to decide whether the hut lay to left or right. It could only be feet away, in any case. Then I found it, sniffed smoke, reached the door and swung it to. With the door at my back, I knew I faced the entrance to the trench and had set off carefully towards it when the thought came that there could be others asleep in other rooms in the hut, who perhaps had not awakened and were even now in process of being suffocated by smoke. But Herschel had the other room in my hut, and beyond that lay a little rest room cum office. With Herschel still at Belvoir, the hut was therefore empty. That was a relief. But what about the other hut, towards the far end of the trench? I vaguely remembered that was empty too. A fair amount of the sleeping accommodation was empty, this late in the year, when most of the summer visitors had returned south. In any case, it was clear enough that whatever was burning was in my hut, not the other, and that the best course of action was to get out of the trench and raise the alarm.