The irregular surfaces were white, blue, yet yellowed from the lamp's light, deeply shaded in places, almost bright in others. I searched among them for a glimpse of green or brown, for something to indicate that Kirton's body was here. With the haft of the ice-axe, I began to push at the lumps of ice, turning them, examining each with care as it moved. But there was nothing. I'd have to go up again. I wanted nothing more than to leave this dreadful place, but the thought of doing so with the mystery still as puzzling as ever after the ordeal of the descent, of facing the worse one of the ascent with nothing to show, that prospect repelled me. I sat prodding with a kind of hopeless determination, turned the blocks, searching the cracks. And suddenly, as a chunk tilted, I saw red; not the red of anger, but perhaps the red of blood. Not much: just a small discoloured patch on a flat piece of ice that must have been part of the surface before the impact.
I prodded again and again, but without success, widening the circle in my anxiety, taking risks I shouldn't take. Then suddenly it happened: a block turned and an arm appeared, the hand dead white, the dark green of the sleeve blackened by the water.
Quickly I reversed the ice-axe and extended the metal head towards it. At the first try, it slid limply away. The second time, the curved end caught briefly and a shoulder and head rose slowly to the surface between two ice blocks. Dark hair swam lank in the water, but the body remained face down. But at last I anchored the steel head in the neck of the parka and lifted, and Kirton's face, swollen and white, but unmistakeable, rolled slowly upwards.
What followed took a long time. In the water, the body could be moved, if clumsily. The moment I tried to lift it clear, sheer weight defeated me. I struggled, tiring now and chilled, without any success at all, until I sat still and thought about it as an engineering problem. Finally I managed to pass a loop of line round his shoulders and knot it to the hook beneath the seat of the bosun's chair. It meant jettisoning the saw, but the saw was useless. Also, I remember thinking wryly as I let it go, it wasn't mine. Then, with the ice-axe head, I fished for his legs and hauled them to the surface. At last, leaning precariously over, I reached for the zip of the parka, slid it down and began to search the pockets of his tunic. Why didn't I just give the three taps, have Kelleher haul the two of us up, and search him at leisure on the surface ? Two reasons, both equally strong: first, I wasn't bloody well going to move now until I knew; secondly, I was reasonably certain two men would not be strong enough to haul a combined weight of twenty-five stones and more through four hundred feet. I found a small squarish leather object in a breast pocket, but it was a wallet, not a diary. Stuffing it into my own parka, I fumbled on, my ungloved hand bitterly cold. The diary was in an inside pocket and I knew what it was as soon as I touched it, numbed fingers or no numbed fingers. The diary was sodden, its papers held together by water. I took off my gloves, letting them dangle from the sleeve strap, then opened the diary carefully and began to peel pages apart, at random. The paper, thin but strong, stood up to it. Kelleher was right about one thing: Kirton had been a committed diarist; every page seemed to have its entry, variable as to length, but written-up religiously. I turned towards the back of the little leather-bound book, where the paper was blank, and began to work backwards towards the final entries. The last one said, 'Polar Bear entered Hundred overnight. Entry point clear,but no exit tracks? Maybe shambled out via tractor shed? Life puzzling and dismal. Shouldn't have played Mozart C Maj, last night. Prescribed A Maj, for mental balance, but not wholly successful.'
My hands were getting clumsier as they grew colder. I peeled that page away, then the next, scanning the entries quickly, with the lamp held awkwardly under my arm. Kirton was no Pepys. He simply mentioned each day's events, the music he'd played on his hi-fi, the books he'd read. He'd told me he found Camp Hundred dull, and the tedium showed.
As page followed page, with the entries varying little apart from the titles of the music and books, disappointment crept over me. It began to seem as though I'd made this hellish drop intothe well for nothing. But then: 'Bold glance from the Chameleon. Tell Smales? But what? - A glance and a feeling that young F, was frightened. But events justified fear.'
My scalp prickled. Who was F? And who in hell was the Chameleon ? There was nothing else. In the loose-leaf notebook there'd been that tantalizing reference: 'I made a note to investigate,' but there was no sign of it here in the diary. Perhaps it had been only a mental note. I put the diary in a pocket in my parka and took one last look round the base of the chamber, my eyes resting longingly on the hard hat. It would make not the slightest difference if one of the icicles crashed down, but that didn't stop me from trying to work out some desperate way of reaching it. The knowledge that I'd have to leave without it made a little shudder pass across my shoulders.
'Pull me up,' I said into the walkie-talkie. There was no response. Instantly my heart began to hammer in my chest. I tried to control it and tapped three times on the microphone. There was a pause that seemed like hours but could only have lasted a few seconds, and then three faint responding taps sounded from the speaker. A moment later my feet lifted off the ice. The long upward haul had begun. Twenty feet up, I realized I had stopped moving and tapped again. Almost immediately I began to move, but after a few more feet the movement stopped. Sitting rigidly still in the bosun's chair, I began to ask myself panicky questions: Was I too heavy? Would the effort of lifting me through four hundred feet be too great for them ? Then a tiny jerk told me I was on my way again and I thought I understood the pattern. They were resting at frequent intervals and I'd just have to live with it. I only looked up once and the sight of the big icicles, all seemingly pointed directly at me, made me determined not to do so again. I sat there, patiently paying out the thin nylon line attached to Kirton's body and trying not to think about anything except the need to restrict movement. The journey would end, one way or another, within some finite time. Either I'd be killed by an ice fall, or I'd reach the top, and the only thing I could do to influence the outcome was to come as close as possible to doing absolutely nothing. Gradually I became accustomed, or as near it as was attainable in the circumstances, to the repeated sudden realization that I was hanging motionless in the void. Then there'd come the reassuring little movement of the chair as Kelleher and his sergeant took up the strain again. I thought of them sweating with the effort and wished I could change places, because now the cold was working its way into me. Hands and feet were chilled through, damped with the contact with the ice, with Kirton's body and the diary. Any danger of frostbite was remote, but the discomfort was increasing steadily.
Coming up into the neck of the bulb, and with the first icicles now below me, I tried again with the walkie-talkie during one of the breaks, and heard Kelleher's faint voice with relief.
'Find anything?'
'Nothing conclusive. I got the diary.'
'Hold on. We'll get you up.' He was breathing heavily as he spoke and I didn't prolong the conversation. The minutes went by. As I emerged from the neck, once more the chair stopped moving. My feet were almost exactly level with the base of the bulb. I heard a tap then : but just one. A moment later there was another. Neither seemed quite to come from the handset, though they could have come from nowhere else and it must be some trick of acoustics.
All the same, I spoke into the mike: 'Kelleher?'
No answer.
'Kelleher!' I said sharply, a few seconds later, anxiety breaking through. Still no response. I tapped then, and called him, and tapped again, fear mushrooming inside me. The loudspeaker remained silent. For a little while, hanging on to the remnants of control, I tried to reason that it must be some malfunction of the walkie-talkie, that the tapping noise had meant Kelleher had dropped and damaged his handset. Soon they'd start again and I'd be on my way. But they didn't start again, and I stayed where I was. By now I was looking at my watch every few seconds and a cold block seemed to have formed in my chest. By the time ten leaden minutes had dragged by, I knew all too well there would be no more winding. Something had happened up there; something that had stopped them; something that would leave me suspended there, three hundred feet down in the icecap!