"We hold it in scorn," then said the forresters,

suicide." "You put the alternative so nicely." He smiled a smile that never touched the cold and determined eyes. "But I guess you're right at that." Lunch that day was a bowl of soup and crackers, poor fare at any time, shockingly insufficient to stay and warm men who would have to work for the next few hours in these bitter sub-zero temperatures above. But there was no help for it: if it would take us a week to reach the coast, and in all optimism I couldn't count on less, rationing would have to start now. In a matter of a couple of hours the thermometer reading had risen with astonishing speedthese dramatic temperature variations were commonplace on the ice-capand it was beginning to snow when we emerged from the hatch and moved across to where the tractor lay. The rise in temperature flattered only to deceive: the south wind brought with it not only snow but a rapidly climbing humidity, and the air was almost unbearably chill. We ripped off the covering tarpaulinit cracked and tore but I was no longer concerned with preserving itand our guests saw for the first time the vehicle upon which all their lives were to depend. Slowly I played my torch over itthe dark shroud of the arctic night had already fallen across the ice-capand I heard the quick indrawn hiss of breath beside me. "Drove it out when the museum attendant wasn't looking, I suppose." Corazzini kept his voice carefully expressionless. "Or did you just find it hereleft over from the last ice-age?" "It is a bit old," I admitted. "Pre-war. But all we can afford. The British Government isn't quite so lavish with its IGY expenditure as the Russians and your people. Know it? It's the prototype, the ancestor of the modern arctic tractor." "Never seen it before. What is it?" "French. A 10-20 Citroen. Underpowered, narrow-tracked as you can see, and far too short for its weight. Lethal in crevasse country. Plods along fairly well on the frozen ice-cap, but you'd be better with a bicycle when there's any depth at all of new-fallen snow. But it's all we have." Corazzini said no more. As the managing director of a factory producing some of the finest tractors in the world, I suppose his heart was too full to say any more. But his disappointment made no difference to his drive, his sheer unflagging determination. For the next few hours he worked like a demon. So, too, did Zagero. Less than five minutes after we had started work we had to stop again to rig up a canvas screen, lashed to accessory camera digital dock easyshare printer aluminium poles brought up from the runnel, round three sides of the tractor: work had been impossible in that snow and knife-like wind that lanced through even the bulkiest layers of clothingand most of them were now wearing so many that they could move only with difficultyas if they were tissue paper. Behind this screen we placed a portable oil stovethe very illusion of warmth was better than nothingtwo storm lanterns and the blow-torches without which we could have made no progress at all. Even with this shelter, practically everyone had to go below from time to time to rub and pound life back into his freezing body: only Jackstraw and I, in our caribou furs, could stay up almost indefinitely. Joss was below all the afternoon: after spending a couple of hours trying to raise our field party on the tractor's emergency radio he gave up and went doggedly back to work on the RCA. Our first job, the removal of the hoped canvas hood, gave us some measure of the difficulty of the task that lay before us. The hood was secured by only seven bolts and nuts, but these had been in position for over four months now, were frozen solid and took over an hour to remove: each set had to be thawed out separately by blow-torch before the heavy wrenches could get the nuts to turn. Then came the assembly of the wooden body. This was in fifteen prefabricated pieces, three each for the floor, sides, roof and frontthe back was only a canvas screen. Each set of three pieces had to be brought out singly through the narrow hatchway before assembly, and it was the devil's own job, in that numbing cold and flickering semi-darkness, to locate and line up the bolt-holes in the wood with the matching holes in the connecting iron cross-pieces. It took us well over an hour to assemble and fit the floor section alone, and it was beginning to look as if we would be here until midnight when Corazzini had the ideaand a brilliant one it seemed at the timeof assembling the various sections in the comparative warmth and brightness of the cabin, sliding the complicated piece out vertically into the food and fuel tunnel, sawing a long narrow slit through the snow roof, which was no more than a foot thick in the middle, and hauling the sections up from below. After this we made rapid progress. By five o'clock the entire body shell was completed and with the end in sight less than a couple of hours away, everyone worked more furiously than ever.