LITMIR.BIZ

       FOUR Monday 6 a.m.–6 p.m.

      For the first time in four months I had forgotten to set the alarm-clock before I went to sleep, and it was late when I awoke, cold and stiff and sore all over from the uneven hardness of the wooden floor. It was still dark as midnight – two or three weeks had passed since the rim of the sun had shown above the horizon for the last time that year, and all the light we had each day was two or three hours dim twilight round noon – but a glance at the luminous face of my watch showed me that it was nine-thirty.

      I pulled the torch out from my parka, located the oil-lamp and lit it. The light was dim, scarcely reaching the far corners of the cabin, but sufficient to show the mummy-like figures lying huddled on the bunks and sprawled grotesquely across the floor, their frozen breath clouding before their faces and above their heads, then condensing on the cabin walls. The walls themselves were sheeted with ice which had extended far out across the roof, in places reaching the skylights, a condition largely brought about by the cold heavy air that had flooded down the opened hatchway during the night: the outside temperature registered on the drum at 54° below zero.

      Not everyone was asleep: most of them, I suspected, had slept but little, the numbing cold had seen to that: but they were as warm in their bunks as they would be anywhere else and nobody showed any inclination to move. Things would be better when the cabin heated up a little.

      I had trouble starting the stove – even though it was gravity fed from a tank above and to one side of it, the fuel oil had thickened up in the cold – but when it did catch it went with a roar. I turned both burners up to maximum, put on the water bucket that had lain on the floor all night and was now nearly a solid mass of ice, pulled on snow-mask and goggles and clambered up the hatchway to have a look at the weather.

      The wind had died away almost completely -I’d known that from the slow and dispirited clacking of the anemometer cups – and the ice-drift, which at times could reach up several hundred feet into the sky, was no more than gentle puffs of dust stirring lazily and spectrally, through the feeble beam of my torch, across the glittering surface of the ice-cap. The wind, such as it was, still held out to the east. The cold, too, was still intense, but more bearable than it had been on the previous night. In terms of the effect of cold on human beings in the Arctic, absolute temperature is far from being the deciding factor: wind is just as important – every extra mile per hour is equivalent to a one degree drop in temperature -and humidity far more so. Where the relative humidity is high, even a few degrees below zero can become intolerable. But today the wind was light and the air dry. Perhaps it was a good omen … After that morning, I never believed in omens again.