And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,

the chances of finding our lights, our cabin, in this weather just don't exist. He's got to land upwind. He's just got to." There was a long silence as we staggered forward, head and shoulders bent almost to waist ievel against the wind and ice-filled drift, then Joss moved close again. "Maybe he'll see the hummocks in time. Maybe he can" "He'll never see them," I said flatly. "Flying into this stuff he can't possibly see a hundred yards in front of him." The radio antenna, rime-coated now to almost fifty times its normal size, sagging deeply and swaying pendulum-like in the wind between each pair of fourteen-foot poles that supported it, stretched away almost 250 feet to the north. We were following the line of this, groping our way blindly from pole to pole and almost at the end of the line, when the roar of the aircraft engines, for the last few seconds no more than a subdued murmur in the night as the wind carried the sound from us, suddenly swelled and increased to a deafening crescendo as I shouted a warning to the others and flung myself flat on the ground: the huge dark shape of the airliner swept directly over us even as I fell. I would have sworn, at the time, that I could have reached out and touched it with my hand, but it must have cleared us by at least ten feetthe antenna poles, we later discovered, were undamaged. Like a fool, I immediately leapt to my feet to try to get a bearing on the vanishing plane and was literally blown head over heels by the tremendous slipstream from the four great propellers, slid helplessly across the frozen crust of the snow and fetched up on my back almost twenty feet from where I had been standing. Cursing, bruised and not a little dazed, I got to my feet again, started off in the direction where I could hear the dogs barking and howling in a paroxysm of fear and excitement, then stopped abruptly and stood quite still. The engines had died, all four of them had died in an instant, and that could mean only one thing: the airliner was about to touch down. Even with the realisation a jarring vibration, of a power and intensity far beyond anything I had expected, reached my feet through the frozen crust of the ice-cap. No ordinary touchdown that, I knew, not even for a belly landing: the pilot must have overestimated his height and set his ship down with force enough to crumple the fuselage, to wreck the plane on the spot. But he hadn't. I was prone to the frozen snow again, ear pressed hard against it, and I could half hear, digital camera dynamic range half feel, a kind of hissing tremor which could only have come from the fuselage, no doubt already splintered and ripped, sliding over the ice, gouging a furrowed path through it. How long this sound continued, I couldn't be suresix seconds, perhaps eight. And then, all at once, came another earth tremor, severer by far than the first, and I heard clearly, even above the gale, the sudden sharp sound of the crash, the grinding tearing scream of metal being twisted and tortured out of shape. And then, abruptly, silencea silence deep and still and ominous, and the sound of the wind in the darkness was no sound at all. Shakily, I rose to my feet. It was then I realised for the first time that I had lost my snow-maskit must have ripped off as I had rolled along the ground. I brought out my torch from under my parkait was always kept there as even a dry battery could freeze and give no light at all if the temperature fell low enoughand probed around in the darkness. But there was no sign of it, the wind could have carried it a hundred yards away by this time. A bad business, indeed, but there was no help for it. I didn't like to think what my face would be like by the time I arrived back at the cabin. Joss and Jackstraw were still trying to quieten the dogs when I rejoined them. "You all right, sir?" Joss asked. He took a step closer. "Good lord, you've lost your mask!" "I know. It doesn't matter." It did matter, for already I could feel the burning sensation in my throat and lungs every time I breathed. "Did you get a bearing on that plane?" "Roughly. Due east, I should say." "Jackstraw?" "A little north of east, I think." He stretched out his hand, pointing straight into the eye of the wind. "We'll go east." Somebody had to make the decision, somebody had to be wrong, and it might as well be me. "We'll go eastJoss, how long is that spool?" "Four hundred yards. More or less." "So. Four hundred yards, then due north. That plane is bound to have left tracks in the snow: with luck, we'll cut across them. Let's hope to heaven it did touch down less than four hundred yards from here." I took the end of the line from the spool, went to the nearest antenna pole, broke off the four-foot-long flag-like frost feathersweird growths of the crystal aggregates of rime that streamed out almost