Read Online Night Without End by Alistair MacLean - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Alistair MacLean
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therefore the coldest. On very cold nights, such as this, the ice reached $e ceiling and started to creep across it to the layers of opaque ice that permanently framed the undersides of our rimed and opaque skylights.
The two exits from the cabin were let into the fourteen-foot sides: one led to the trap, the other to the snow and ice tunnel where we kept our food, petrol, oil, batteries, radio generators, explosives for seismological and glacial investigations and a hundred and one other items. Half-way along, a secondary tunnel led off at right angles - a tunnel which steadily increased in length as we cut out the blocks of snow which were melted to give us our water supply. At the far end of the main tunnel lay our primitive toilet system.
One eighteen-foot wall and half of the wall that gave access to the trap-door were lined with twin rows of bunks - eight in all. The other eighteen-foot wall was given over entirely to our stove, work-bench, radio table and housings for the meteorological instruments. The remaining wall by the tunnel was piled with tins and cases of food, now mostly empties, that had been brought in from the runnel to begin the lengthy process of defrosting.
Slowly I surveyed all this, then as slowly surveyed the company. The incongruity of the contrast reached the point where one all but disbelieved the evidence of one's own eyes. But they were there all right, and I was stuck with them. Everyone had stopped talking now and was looking at me, waiting for me to speak: sitting in a tight semi-circle round the stove, they were huddled together and shivering in the freezing cold. The only sounds in the room were the clacking of the anemometer cups, clearly audible down the ventilation pipe, the faint moaning of the wind on the ice-cap and the hissing of our pressure Colman lamp. I sighed to myself, and put down my empty glass.
"Well, it looks as if you are going to be our guests for some little time, so we'd better introduce ourselves. Us first." I nodded to where Joss and Jackstraw were working on the shattered RCA, which they had lifted back on the table. "On the left, Joseph London, of the city of London, our radio operator."
"Unemployed," Joss muttered.
"On the right, Nils Nielsen. Take a good look at him, ladies and gentlemen. At this very moment the guardian angels of your respective insurance companies are probably putting up a prayer f 46r his continued well-being. If you all live to come home again, "toe chances are that you will owe it to him." I was to remember my own words later. "He probably knows more than any man living about survival on the Greenland ice-cap."
"I thought you called him 'Jackstraw'." Marie LeGarde murmured.
"My Eskimo name." Jackstraw had turned and smiled at her, his parka hood off for the first time; I could see her polite astonishment as she looked at the fair hair, the blue eyes, and it was as if Jackstraw read her thoughts. "Two of my grandparents were Danish - most of us Greenlanders have as much Danish blood as Eskimo in us nowadays." I was surprised to hear him talk like this, and it was a tribute to Marie LeGarde's personality: his pride in his Eskimo background was equalled only by his touchiness on the subject.
"Well, well, how interesting." The expensive young lady was sitting back on her box, hands clasped round an expensively-nyloned knee, her expression reflecting accurately the well-bred condescension of her tone. "My very first Eskimo."
"Don't be afraid, lady." Jackstraw's smile was wider than ever, and I felt more than vaguely uneasy; his almost invariable Eskimo cheerfulness and good nature concealed an explosive temper which he'd probably inherited from some far distant Viking forebear. "It doesn't rub
The two exits from the cabin were let into the fourteen-foot sides: one led to the trap, the other to the snow and ice tunnel where we kept our food, petrol, oil, batteries, radio generators, explosives for seismological and glacial investigations and a hundred and one other items. Half-way along, a secondary tunnel led off at right angles - a tunnel which steadily increased in length as we cut out the blocks of snow which were melted to give us our water supply. At the far end of the main tunnel lay our primitive toilet system.
One eighteen-foot wall and half of the wall that gave access to the trap-door were lined with twin rows of bunks - eight in all. The other eighteen-foot wall was given over entirely to our stove, work-bench, radio table and housings for the meteorological instruments. The remaining wall by the tunnel was piled with tins and cases of food, now mostly empties, that had been brought in from the runnel to begin the lengthy process of defrosting.
Slowly I surveyed all this, then as slowly surveyed the company. The incongruity of the contrast reached the point where one all but disbelieved the evidence of one's own eyes. But they were there all right, and I was stuck with them. Everyone had stopped talking now and was looking at me, waiting for me to speak: sitting in a tight semi-circle round the stove, they were huddled together and shivering in the freezing cold. The only sounds in the room were the clacking of the anemometer cups, clearly audible down the ventilation pipe, the faint moaning of the wind on the ice-cap and the hissing of our pressure Colman lamp. I sighed to myself, and put down my empty glass.
"Well, it looks as if you are going to be our guests for some little time, so we'd better introduce ourselves. Us first." I nodded to where Joss and Jackstraw were working on the shattered RCA, which they had lifted back on the table. "On the left, Joseph London, of the city of London, our radio operator."
"Unemployed," Joss muttered.
"On the right, Nils Nielsen. Take a good look at him, ladies and gentlemen. At this very moment the guardian angels of your respective insurance companies are probably putting up a prayer f 46r his continued well-being. If you all live to come home again, "toe chances are that you will owe it to him." I was to remember my own words later. "He probably knows more than any man living about survival on the Greenland ice-cap."
"I thought you called him 'Jackstraw'." Marie LeGarde murmured.
"My Eskimo name." Jackstraw had turned and smiled at her, his parka hood off for the first time; I could see her polite astonishment as she looked at the fair hair, the blue eyes, and it was as if Jackstraw read her thoughts. "Two of my grandparents were Danish - most of us Greenlanders have as much Danish blood as Eskimo in us nowadays." I was surprised to hear him talk like this, and it was a tribute to Marie LeGarde's personality: his pride in his Eskimo background was equalled only by his touchiness on the subject.
"Well, well, how interesting." The expensive young lady was sitting back on her box, hands clasped round an expensively-nyloned knee, her expression reflecting accurately the well-bred condescension of her tone. "My very first Eskimo."
"Don't be afraid, lady." Jackstraw's smile was wider than ever, and I felt more than vaguely uneasy; his almost invariable Eskimo cheerfulness and good nature concealed an explosive temper which he'd probably inherited from some far distant Viking forebear. "It doesn't rub
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