Night Without End by Alistair Maclean

Author:Alistair Maclean [Maclean, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: literature_adv

CHAPTER EIGHT – Wednesday 4 A.M. – 8 P.M.

Despite our exhaustion, despite our almost overwhelming need for sleep, I don't think anyone slept that night, even for a moment, for to have slept would have been to freeze to death.

I had never known such cold. Even with twelve of us jam-packed inside a tiny wooden box built to hold five sleeping people at the most, even with the oil fire roaring up the chimney all night long and wanned by a couple of cups of piping hot coffee apiece, we all of us suffered agonies during these dark hours. The chattering of teeth, the St Vitus' dance of tremor-ridden limbs knocking against the thin uninsulated wooden walls, the constant rubbing as someone sought to restore life to a frozen face or arm or foot. These were the sounds that never ceased. How the elderly Marie LeGarde or the sick Mahler survived that night was indeed a matter for wonder.

But survive they did, for when I looked at my luminous watch, saw that it was almost four o'clock and decided that enough was enough, both of them were wide awake when I switched on the little overhead light. Weak enough normally, that light was now no more than a feeble yellow glow– an ominous sign, it meant that even the tractor batteries were beginning to freeze up – but enough to see the crowded circle of faces, white and blue and yellowing with frostbite, the smoke-like exhalations that clouded in the air before them with every breath they took, the film of slick ice that already covered the walls and all of the roof except for a few inches round the stove pipe exit. As a spectacle of suffering, of sheer unrelieved misery, I don't think I have ever seen its equal.

"Insomnia, eh, Doc?" It was Corazzini speaking, his teeth chattering between the words. "Or just forgotten to plug in your electric blanket?"

"Just an early riser, Mr Corazzini." I glanced round the haggard and pain-filled faces. "Anybody here slept at all?"

I was answered by mute headshakes from everybody.

"Anybody likely to sleep?"

Again the headshakes.

"That settles it." I struggled to my feet. "It's only 4 a.m., but if we're going to freeze to death we might as well freeze on the move. Not only that, but another few hours in this temperature, and that tractor engine will never start again. What do you think, Jackstraw?"

"I'll get the blow-torches," he said by way of answer, and pushed his way out through the canvas screen. Almost at once I heard him begin to cough violently in the deadly cold of the air outside, and, in the intervals between the coughing, we could clearly hear the dry rustling crackling of his breath as the moisture condensed, froze and drifted away in the all but imperceptible breeze.

Corazzini and I followed, choking and gasping in turn as that glacial cold seared through throat and lungs, adjusting masks and goggles until not a millimetre of flesh was left exposed.

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