Алистер Маклин - Night Without End

I suppose that after Smallwood had gone far enough to consider that we would never be able to reach that point, he had cut loose dogs and dog-sledge as a needless encumbrance – but not before he had severed all the traces attaching the dogs to the sledge and, I noticed grimly, removed all the wraps and the magnetic compass that had been there. He thought of everything. For a moment, admiration for the man’s undoubtedly remarkable qualities came in to supplant what had become the motivating reason for my existence, a reason that, as the hours crawled by, were crowding out even the feelings I had for Margaret Ross: my hatred for Smallwood burned like a cold steady flame, an obsession with the idea of sinking my fingers into that scrawny throat and never letting go.

Within three minutes of finding the sledge we had tied together the severed remnants of the traces, changed them to the front and were on our way again, Marie LeGarde, Mahler and Helene propped up on the thin wooden slats. We had, of course, to pull the sledge ourselves, but that was nothing: for Jackstraw, Zagero and myself, the relief was beyond measure. But it was only momentary.

We were running on to the smooth, slick ice of the Kangalak glacier, but our progress was no faster than it had been before we found the sledge. The wind was climbing up to its maximum now, the blizzard shrieking along horizontally to the ground and coming in great smoking flurries that cut visibility to zero and made us stop and grab one another lest one of us be knocked flying and for ever lost to sight: several times Theodore Mahler, restless in unconsciousness, rolled off the sledge until I at last made Brewster sit at the back and watch. He protested violently, but he was glad to do as I said.

I don’t remember much after that, I think I must have been unconscious, eyes shut, but still plodding along in my sleep on leaden, frozen feet. My first conscious memory after installing Brewster on the back of the sledge was of someone shaking me urgently by the shoulder. It was Jackstraw.

‘No more!’ he shouted in my ear. ‘We must stop, Dr Mason, wait till it’s blown itself out. We can’t live through this.’

I said something that was unintelligible even to myself, but Jackstraw took it for agreement and began pulling the sledge into the sloping side of the glacier valley and to the leeward side of one of the snowdrifts piled up against some of the ridges on the side of the valley. It wasn’t all that much of an improvement, but the wind and the effect of the blizzard were perceptibly less. We unloaded the three sick people on the sledge into what pitiful shelter the ridge offered: I was just about to let my knees buckle and collapse beside them when I realised that someone was missing: it was a fair indication of the toll taken by wind and cold and exhaustion that almost twenty seconds passed before I realised it was Brewster.

‘Good God!’ I cried in Jackstraw’s ear. ‘The Senator – we’ve lost him! I’ll go back and look. I won’t be a minute.’

‘Stay here.’ The grip on my arm was promise enough that Jackstraw meant to detain me by force, if necessary. ‘You’d never come back. Balto! Balto!’ He shouted a few Eskimo words which meant nothing to me, but the big Siberian seemed to understand, for he was gone in a moment, following the direction of Jackstraw’s pointing hand. He was back again inside two minutes.

‘He’s found him?’ I asked Jackstraw.

Jackstraw nodded silently.

‘Let’s bring him in.’

Balto led us there, but we didn’t bring him in. Instead we left him lying where we found him, face down in the snow, dead. The blizzard was already drawing its concealing shroud over him, in an hour he would be no more than a featureless white mound in a featureless white valley. My hands were too numb to examine him, but I wouldn’t have bothered anyway: the half-century of self-indulgence in food and drink and temper, all of which had been so clearly reflected in the heavy florid face when first I’d seen him, had had their inevitable way. The heart, cerebral thrombosis, it didn’t matter now. But he had been a man.

How long we lay there, the six of us and Balto huddled close together for warmth, unconscious or dozing while that hurricane of a blizzard reached then passed its howling crescendo, I never knew. Probably only half an hour, perhaps not even that. When I awoke, stiff and numbed, I reached for Jackstraw’s torch. It was exactly four o’clock in the morning.

I looked at the others. Jackstraw was wide awake – I was pretty sure he’d never shut an eye lest one of us slip away from sleep into that easy frozen sleep from which there would have been no wakening – and Zagero was stirring. That they – and I – would survive, I didn’t doubt. Helene was a question mark. A seventeen-year-old, though short on endurance, was usually high on resilience and recuperative powers, but Helene’s seemed to have deserted her. After the death of her mistress and up to the time she had collapsed she had become strangely withdrawn and unresponsive, and I guessed that the death of Mrs Dansby-Gregg had hit her far more than any of us would have guessed. The previous forty-eight hours apart, it seemed to me that she had had little enough to thank Mrs Dansby-Gregg for in the way of affection and warmth: but, then, she was young, Mrs Dansby-Gregg had been the person she had known best and, as a foreigner, she must have regarded Mrs Dansby-Gregg as her sole anchor in an alien sea … I asked Jackstraw if he would massage her hands, then turned to have a look at Mahler and Marie LeGarde.

‘They don’t look so hot to me.’ Zagero, too, was studying them. ‘What’s their chances, Doc?’

‘I just don’t know,’ I said wearily. ‘I don’t know at all.’

‘Don’t take it to heart, Doc. It’s no fault of yours.’ Zagero waved a hand towards the snow-filled emptiness and desolation of the glacier. ‘Your dispensary ain’t all that well stocked.’

‘No.’ I smiled faintly, then nodded at Mahler. ‘Bend down and listen to his breathing. The end’s coming pretty close. Ordinarily I’d say a couple of hours. With Mahler I don’t know – he’s got the will to live, sheer guts, his beliefs – the lot … But in twelve hours he’ll be dead.’

‘And how long do you give me, Dr Mason?’

I twisted round and gazed down at Marie LeGarde. Her voice was no more than a weak, husky whisper: she was trying to smile, but the smile was a pitiful grimace and there was no humour in either the eyes or the voice.

‘Good lord, you’ve come to!’ I reached out, pulled off her gloves and started to massage the frozen wasted hands. ‘This is wonderful. How do you feel, Miss LeGarde?’

‘How do you think I feel?’ she said with a flash of her old spirit. ‘Don’t try to put me off, Peter. How long?’

‘About another thousand curtain calls at the old Adelphi.’ The light came from the torch that had been thrust, butt down, into the snow, and I bent forward so that my face was shadowed, my expression unreadable. ‘Seriously, the fact that you’ve recovered consciousness is a good sign.’

‘I once played a queen who recovered consciousness only to speak a few dramatic words before she died. Only, I can’t think of any dramatic words.’ I had to strain to catch the feeble whispered words. ‘You’re a shocking liar, Peter. Is there any hope for us at all?’

‘Certainly,’ I lied. Anything to get away from that topic. ‘We’ll be on the coast, with a good chance of being picked up by ship or plane, tomorrow afternoon – this afternoon, rather. It can’t be more than twenty miles from here.’

‘Twenty miles!’ Zagero interjected. ‘In this little lot?’

He raised a cupped hand significantly to his ear, a gesture superbly superfluous in the ululating shriek of the blizzard.