We made to light the paraffin blow-torches but they, too, were frozen solid: paraffin freezes at just over -50°, and even at -40° it still flows like heavy gear-case oil. We had to thaw them out with a petrol blow-torch, then place all five of them on wooden boxes and behind canvas aprons to retain the heat, two to thaw out the crankcase, two for the gear-box and transmission and the last for the differential. After an hour or so, when the engine had begun to turn fairly easily and we had brought out the heavy battery which had been thawing out by the stove, we tried again. But it gave no sign of life at all.
None of us, not even Corazzini whose Global tractors were all diesel-powered, was an expert in engine maintenance, and this was when we came very close to despair. But despair was the one emotion we couldn’t afford, and we knew it. We kept the blow-torches burning, returned the battery to the stove, removed and cleaned the plugs, eased the frozen brushes in the generator, stripped and removed the petrol lines, thawed them and sucked out the frozen condensation by mouth, scraped away the ice from the carburettor intake and returned everything in place. We had to remove our gloves for most of this delicate work, the flesh stuck to metal and pulled off like the skin of an orange when we removed our hands, even the backs of our fingers became burnt and blistered from casual knocks on metal, blood oozed out from under our fingernails only to coagulate in the freezing air, and our lips, where they had touched the copper petrol feeds, were swollen and puffed and blistered. It was brutal, killing work, and in addition to the work our arms and legs and faces were almost constantly frozen, despite frequent visits to the stove to thaw ourselves out. It was murderous – but it was worth it. At six-fifteen, two and a quarter hours after we had begun, the big engine coughed and spluttered into life, missed, coughed again, caught and settled down into a steady even roar. I felt my split lips cracking into a painful grin under my mask, thumped Jackstraw and Corazzini – for the moment quite forgetting that the latter might be one of the killers – on the back, turned and went in for breakfast.
Or what passed for breakfast. It was little enough, heaven knew – coffee, crackers and the contents of a couple of corned beef tins shared among the twelve of us, the lion’s share going to Theodore Mahler. That left us with only four more tins of beef, four cans of vegetables, about ten pounds of dried fruit, a little frozen fish, a small tin of biscuits, three packets of cereal and – it was the only thing apart from coffee of which we had an adequate supply – over twenty tins of Nestle’s unsweetened milk. We had, of course, seal meat for the dogs – Jackstraw thawed some out for them over the stove while we had breakfast – and the fried meat of young seal is palatable to a degree. But the dogs had first claim on that. It was more important to preserve their strength than our own: should the engine of the Citroen break down completely, our last hope lay with the dogs.
Breakfast over and the dogs fed, we started off just before moonset, Corazzini driving, with the long trailing plume of our exhaust vapour, milk-white but thick as smoke in that bitter air, stretching out far behind us, bar-straight, almost as far as the eye could see in the waning light of the moon. I had arranged that the drivers should change over every fifteen minutes – as long a period as any person could stand in that unheated and largely unprotected cabin. I had heard of a case in the Antarctic where a driver had sat so long in an exposed tractor that his numbed and frozen fingers had locked so immovably that the steering-wheel had had to be unbolted and brought inside still clutched in the driver’s grasp before the hands could be thawed sufficiently to release the wheel: I didn’t want anything of that kind happening to us.
As soon as we were under way I had a look at Mahler, and his appearance certainly did nothing to inspire any great confidence in his chances. Even although he was fully dressed, lying in an eiderdown sleeping-bag that was zipped all the way to his chin, and covered in blankets, his pinched face was a mottled blue-white and he was shaking continuously with the cold, a handkerchief between his teeth to prevent their chattering. I reached for his wrist. The pulse was very fast, though it seemed strong enough: but I couldn’t be sure, so much skin had been sloughed or burnt off in the past two or three hours that I’d lost all sensitivity in my fingertips. I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile.
“Well, how do you feel, Mr Mahler?”
“No worse than anyone else, I’m sure, Dr Mason.”
“That could still be bad enough. Hungry?”
“Hungry!” he exclaimed. “Thanks to the generosity of these good people here, I couldn’t eat another crumb.”
It was typical of what I had come to expect of this gentle Jew in the past few hours. Despite the relatively generous amount of food he’d had for his breakfast, he’d wolfed it all down like a famished man. He was hungry, all right: his body, lacking the insulin to break down the mounting sugar in his blood, was crying out for nourishment yet unable to find it no matter what his food intake was.
“Thirsty?”
He nodded. Perhaps he thought he was on safe ground there, but it was another and invariable symptom, of the developing acuteness of his trouble. I was pretty certain, too, that he had already begun to weaken, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before he began to lose weight rapidly. Indeed, he already looked thinner, the cheekbones were more prominent, than even thirty-six hours ago. But then that was true of all the others also, especially Marie LeGarde: for all her uncomplaining courage, her determined cheerfulness, she now looked more than old: she looked sick, and very tired. But there was nothing I could do for her.
“Your feet?” I asked Mahler. “How are they?”
“I don’t think they’re there any longer,” he smiled.
“Let me see them,” I asked sharply. He protested, but I overruled him. One look at that dead-white ice-cold flesh was enough.
“Miss Ross,” I said. “From now on you are Mr Mahler’s personal Gunga Din. We have a couple of rubber bags in the sled. I want you to keep these alternately filled just as soon as you can get water heated – unfortunately, it takes a long time to melt that damned snow. They’re for Mr Mahler’s feet.” Again Mahler protested, objecting to what he called ‘This babying’, but I ignored him. I didn’t want to tell him, not yet, that frostbite in the feet of an untreated diabetic could mean only one thing: gangrene and amputation, at the least. Slowly I looked round the occupants of the tractor cabin and I think that had I known for certain who the person responsible for all this was, I would have killed him without compunction.
Just then Corazzini came in. After only fifteen minutes at the wheel of the tractor he had just yielded to Jackstraw he was in a pretty bad way. The bluish-white bloodless face was mottled with yellow frostbite blisters, his lips were cracked, the fingernails were beginning to discolour and his hands were in a shocking mess. True, Jackstraw, Zagero and I were little better, but Corazzini was the only one who had driven in that intense cold: he was shaking like a man with malarial fever, and from the way he stumbled up the steps I could see that his legs were gone. I helped him to a vacant seat by the stove.
“Feel anything below the knees?” I asked quickly.
“Not a damned thing.” He tried to smile, but the effort was too painful, the blood started to well again from the open cuts on his lips. “It’s pretty vicious out there, Doc. Better rub the old feet with some snow, huh?” He stooped and rumbled uselessly at laces with his numbed and bleeding fingers, but before he could move Margaret Ross was on her knees, easing off his boots with gentle fingers. Looking down at that slight figure lost beneath the bulky layers of clothing, I wondered for the hundredth time how I could ever have been crazy enough to believe about her all the things I had done.
“In your own idiom, Mr Corazzini,” I said, “snow is strictly for the birds. Just an old wives’ tale as far as these temperatures are concerned. You’d be better rubbing your skin off with emery-paper.” At 70° below, snow had the hard crystalline structure of sandstone, and, when rubbed, granulated into a gritty white powdery sand. I nodded to one of the snow-buckets on the stove. “When the temperature there reaches 85°, stick your feet in it. Wait till the skin turns red. It won’t be pleasant, but it’ll work. If there are any blisters I’ll puncture and sterilise them tomorrow.”