"By the truth of my body," the sheriff he said,

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 upbut 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 nocent dc1020 digital camera 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. Abreast the driving cabin I drew out my torch and glanced at the alcohol thermometerordinary mercury froze solid at38then looked again in disbelief. The red spirit inside the glass had sunk down to within an inch of the bulb and stood on the line of -68exactly one hundred degrees of frost. Still well below Wegener's -85, further short still of the incredible -125 that the Russians had recorded at the Vostok in Antarctica, but nevertheless the lowest, by almost fifteen degrees, that I had ever experienced. And that it should happen nownow, two hundred miles from the nearest human habitation, with Jackstraw and myself stuck with two murderers, a possibly dying man, seven other passengers rapidly weakening from exposure, exhaustion and lack of food, and a superannuated tractor that was due to pack up at any moment at all. Over an hour later I had cause to revise the last part of that estimateit seemed that the tractor had already packed up. I had had my first intimation of trouble to come when I had switched on the ignition and pressed the hornthe faint mournful beep could hardly have been heard twenty yards away. The batteries were so gummed up by the cold that they couldn't even have turned over a hot engine, far less one in which the crankcase, transmission and differential were all but locked solid in lubricating oil that had lost all power to lubricate anything and had been turned into a super viscous liquid with the consistency and intractability of some heavy animal glue. Even with two of us bringing all our weight to bear on the starting handle it was impossible to turn even one cylinder over the top. We made to light the paraffin blow-torches but they, too, were frozen solid: paraffin freezes at just over -50, and even at -40 it still flows like heavy gear-case oil. We had to thaw them out with a petrol blow-torch, then place all five of them on wooden boxes and behind canvas aprons to retain the heat, two to thaw out the crankcase, two for the gear-box and transmission and the last for the differential. After an