Night Without End [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONEMonday midnightIt was Jackstraw who heard it firstit was always Jackstraw, whose hearing was an even match for his phenomenal eyesight, who heard things first. Tired of having my exposed hands alternately frozen, I had dropped my book, zipped my sleeping-bag up to the chin and was drowsily watching him carving figurines from a length of inferior narwhal tusk when his hands suddenly fell still and he sat quite motionless. Then, unhurriedly as always, he dropped the piece of bone into the coffee-pan that simmered gently by the side of our oil-burner stove curio collectors paid fancy prices for what they imagined to be the dark ivory of fossilised elephant tusksrose and put his ear to the ventilation shaft, his eyes remote in the unseeing gaze of a man lost in listening. A couple of seconds were enough." Aeroplane," he announced casually." Aeroplane!" I propped myself up on an elbow and stared at him. " Jackstraw, you've been hitting the methylated spirits again."" Indeed, no. Dr. Mason.'' The blue eyes, so incongruously at variance with the swarthy face and the broad Eskimo cheekbones, crinkled into a smile: coffee was Jackstraw's strongest tippl^! and we both knew it. " I can hear it plainly now. You must come and listen."" No, thanks." It had taken me fifteen minutes to thaw out the frozen condensation in my sleeping-bag, and I was just beginning to feel warm for the first time. Heaven only knew that the presence of a plane in the heart of that desolate ice plateau was singular enoughin the four months since our I.G.Y. station had been set up this was the first time we had had any contact, however indirectly, with the world and the civilisation that lay so unimaginably beyond our horizonsbut it wasn't going to help either the plane or myself if I got my feet frozen again. I lay back and stared up through our two plat glass skylights: but as always they were completely opaque, covered with a thick coating of rime and dusting of snow. I looked away from the skylights across to where Joss, our young7