The credulous hope of mutual minds is o'er,

in for breakfast. Or what passed for breakfast. It was little enough, heaven knewcoffee, crackers and the contents of a couple of corned beef tins shared among the twelve of us, the lion's share going to Theodore Mahler. That left us with only four more tins of beef, four cans of vegetables, about ten pounds of dried fruit, a little frozen fish, a small tin of biscuits, three packets of cereal andit was the only thing apart from coffee of which we had an adequate supplyover twenty tins of Nestle's unsweetened milk. We had, of course, seal meat for the dogsJackstraw thawed some out for them over the stove while we had breakfastand the fried meat of young seal is palatable to a degree. But the dogs had first claim on that. It was more important to preserve their strength than our own: should the engine of the Citroen break down completely, our last hope lay with the dogs. Breakfast over and the dogs fed, we started off just before moonset, Corazzini driving, with the long trailing plume of our exhaust vapour, milk-white but thick as smoke in that bitter air, stretching out far behind us, bar-straight, almost as far as the eye could see in the waning light of the moon. I had arranged that the drivers should change over every fifteen minutesas long a period as any person could stand in that unheated and largely unprotected cabin. I had heard of a case in the Antarctic where a driver had sat so long in an exposed tractor that his numbed and frozen fingers had locked so immovably that the steering-wheel had had to be unbolted and brought inside still clutched in the driver's grasp before the hands could be thawed sufficiently to release the wheel: I didn't want anything of that kind happening to us. As soon as we were under way I had a look at Mahler, and his appearance certainly did nothing to inspire any great confidence in his chances. Even although he was fully dressed, lying in an eiderdown sleeping-bag that was zipped all the way to his chin, and covered in blankets, his pinched face was a mottled blue-white and he was shaking continuously with the cold, a handkerchief between his teeth to prevent their chattering. I reached for his wrist. The pulse was very fast, though it seemed strong enough: but I couldn't be sure, so much skin had been sloughed or burnt off in the past two or three hours that I'd lost all sensitivity in my fingertips. I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile. "Well, how do you feel, Mr Mahler?" "No worse than anyone else, camera digital panasonic at shopping com I'm sure, Dr Mason." "That could still be bad enough. Hungry?" "Hungry!" he exclaimed. "Thanks to the generosity of these good people here, I couldn't eat another crumb." It was typical of what I had come to expect of this gentle Jew in the past few hours. Despite the relatively generous amount of food he'd had for his breakfast, he'd wolfed it all down like a famished man. He was hungry, all right: his body, lacking the insulin to break down the mounting sugar in his blood, was crying out for nourishment yet unable to find it no matter what his food intake was. "Thirsty?" He nodded. Perhaps he thought he was on safe ground there, but it was another and invariable symptom, of the developing acuteness of his trouble. I was pretty certain, too, that he had already begun to weaken, and I knew it wouldn't be long before he began to lose weight rapidly. Indeed, he already looked thinner, the cheekbones were more prominent, than even thirty-six hours ago. But then that was true of all the others also, especially Marie LeGarde: for all her uncomplaining courage, her determined cheerfulness, she now looked more than old: she looked sick, and very tired. But there was nothing I could do for her. "Your feet?" I asked Mahler. "How are they?" "I don't think they're there any longer," he smiled. "Let me see them," I asked sharply. He protested, but I overruled him. One look at that dead-white ice-cold flesh was enough. "Miss Ross," I said. "From now on you are Mr Mahler's personal Gunga Din. We have a couple of rubber bags in the sled. I want you to keep these alternately filled just as soon as you can get water heatedunfortunately, it takes a long time to melt that damned snow. They're for Mr Mahler's feet." Again Mahler protested, objecting to what he called 'This babying', but I ignored him. I didn't want to tell him, not yet, that frostbite in the feet of an untreated diabetic could mean only one thing: gangrene and amputation, at the least. Slowly I looked round the occupants of the tractor cabin and I think that had I known for certain who the person responsible for all this was, I would have killed him without compunction. Just then Corazzini came in. After only fifteen minutes at the wheel of the tractor he had just yielded to Jackstraw he was in a pretty