smile and David slapped the polished teak top of the chart table.
Touch wood, and don't dare the devil. Nick felt his early despair
slipping away with his fatigue, and he took another big mouthful and
savoured it as he strode to the front windows and stared ahead.
The sea had flattened dramatically, but a weak and butter-yellow sun low
on the horizon gave no warmth, and Nick glanced up at the thermometer
and read the outside air temperature at minus thirty degrees.
Down here below 600 south, the weather was so unstable, caught up on the
wheel of endlessly circling atmospheric depressions, that a gale could
rise in minutes and drop to a flat calm almost as swiftly. Yet foul
-weather was the rule. For a hundred days and more each year, the wind
was at gale-force or above. The photographs of Antarctica always gave a
completely false impression Of fine days with the sun sparkling on
pristine snow fields and lovely towering icebergs. The truth was that
you cannot take photographs in a blizzard or a white-out.
Nick distrusted this calm, and yet found himself praying that it would
hold. He wanted to increase speed again, and was on the point of taking
that chance, when the officer of the watch called a sharp alteration of
course.
Ahead of them, Nick made out the sullen swirl of hidden ice below the
surface, like a lurking monster, and as Warlock altered course to avoid
it, the ice broke the surface.
Black ice, striated with bands of glacial mud, ugly and deadly.
Nick did not pass the order for the increase in speed.
We should be raising Cape Alarm within the hour/ David Allen gloated
beside him. If this visibility holds.
It won't/ said Nick. We'll have fog pretty soon/ and he indicated the
surface of the sea, which was beginning to steam, emitting ghostly
tendrils and eddies of seafret, as the difference between sea and air
temperature widened.
We'll be at the Golden Adventurer in four hours more., David was
bubbling with renewed excitement, and he slapped the teak table again.
With your permission, sir, I'll go down and double-check the
rocket-lines and tow equipment.] While the air around them thickened
into a ghostly white soup, and blotted out all visibility to a few
hundred yards, Nick paced the bridge like a caged lion, his hands
clasped behind his back and a black unlit cheroot clamped between his
teeth. He broke his pacing every time that the Trog intercepted another
transmission from either Christy Marine, Jules Levoisin or Captain
Reilly on his VHF radio.
At midmorning, Reilly reported that he and his slow convoy had reached
Shackleton Bay without further losses, that they were taking full
advantage of the moderating weather to set up an encampment, and he
ended by urging La Mouette to keep a watch on 121,5 Mega Hertz to try
and locate the missing life-raft that had broken away during the night.
La Mouette did not acknowledge.
They aren't reading on the VHF/grunted the Trog.
Nick thought briefly of the hapless souls adrift in this cold, and
decided that they would probably not last out the day unless the
