Thy looks are wan, thine eyes are wet.

easy. On the way up from the coast, over four months previously, we had planted big marker flags at intervals of half a mile. On a night such as this, with the moonlight flooding the ice-cap, these trail flags, a bright luminous orange in colour and mounted on aluminium poles stuck in snow beacons, were visible at a great distance, with never less than two and sometimes three in sight at the same time, the long glistening frost feathers stretching out from the poles sometimes twice the length of the flags themselves. We counted twenty-eight of these flags altogetherabout a dozen were missingthen, after a sudden dip in the land, completely lost them: whether they had blown away or just drifted under it was impossible to say. "Well, there it is, Jackstraw," I said resignedly. "This is where one of us starts getting cold. Really cold." "We've been cold before, Dr Mason. Me first." He slid the magnetic compass off its brackets, started to unreel a cable from a spool under the dashboard, then jumped out, still unwinding the cable, while I followed to help. Despite the fact that the magnetic north pole is nowhere near the north poleat that time it was almost a thousand miles south of it and lay more to the west than north of usa magnetic compass, when proper variation allowances are made, is still useful in high latitudes: but because of the counter-acting magnetic effects of a large mass of metal, it was quite useless when mounted on the tractor itself. Our plan, therefore, was that someone should He with the compass on the dog-sled, fifty feet behind the tractor, and, by means of a switch which operated red and green lights in the tractor dashboard, guide the driver to left or right. It wasn't our original idea, it wasn't even a recent idea: it had been used in the Antarctic a quarter century previously but, as far as I knew, had not been improved upon yet. With Jackstraw established on the sledge, I walked back to the tractor and pushed aside the canvas screen at the back of the wooden body. What with the faces of the passengers, drawn and pinched and weirdly pale in the light of the tiny overhead bulb, the constant shivering, the chattering of teeth and the frozen breath drifting upwards to condense and freeze on the wooden roof, it was a picture of utter and abject misery: but I was in no mood to be moved at that moment. "Sorry for the delay," I said. "Just off again now. But I want one of you for a lookout." Both Zagero and Corazzini volunteered almost in the same breath, but I shook my head. wifi digital camera with email "You two get what sleep or rest you canI'm liable to need you very much later on. Perhaps you, Mr Mahler?" He looked pale and ill, but he nodded silently, and Zagero said in a quiet voice: "Corazzini and myself too high up on the list of suspects, huh?" "I wouldn't put either of you at the very foot," I said shortly. I waited till Mahler had climbed down then dropped the canvas and walked round to the driver's seat. Theodore Mahler, strangely enough, proved only too anxious to talkand keep on talking. It was so completely out of keeping with the idea I had formed of his character that I was more than surprised. Loneliness, perhaps, I thought, or trying to forget the situation, or trying to divert my thoughts and suspicions: how wrong I was on all three counts I wasn't to find out until later. "Well, Mr Mahler, it looks as if the itinerary of your European trip is going to be upset a bit." I had almost to shout to make my words heard above the roar of the tractor. "Not Europe, Dr Mason." I could hear the machine-gun-like chatter of his teeth. "Israel." "You live there?" "Never been there in my life.1 There was a pause, and when his voice came again it was all but drowned in the sound of the engine. I thought I caught the words 'My home'. "Youyou're going to start a new life there, Mr Mahler?" Tm sixty-ninetomorrow," he answered obliquely. "A new life? Let's say, rather, that I'm going to end an old one." "And you're going to live there, make your home thereafter sixty-nine years in another country?" "Millions of us Jews have done just that, in the past ten years. Not that I've lived in America all my life. . . . " And then he told me his storya story of refugee oppression that I'd heard a hundred times, with a hundred variations. He was a Russian Jew, he said, one of the millions of the largest Jewry in the world that had been 'frozen' for over a century in the notorious Pale of Settlement, and in 1905 had been forced to flee with his fatherleaving mother and two brothers behindto escape the ruthless massacres carried out by the 'Black Hundreds' at the behest of the last of the Romanoff Tzars who was seeking scapegoats for his crushing defeat by the Japanese. His mother, he learned later, had just disappeared, while his two brothers had survived only to die in