Free The Great White Space by Basil Copper Page A

our later knowledge.
    The Professor and I continued in Number 1 Command vehicle, with Van Damm alone in the middle and with Prescott and Holden in the third vehicle at the rear. Scarsdale had hoped to cross the plain in four hours or so at our maximum cruising speed but in the event it was nearer six before I heard his warning mutter; I altered my steering vector and the tractor's treads grated over solid rock as we slid upwards out of the warm dust and into the welcome shade of some stunted trees. A stiff breeze was blowing down the gully and when I had steered the tractor about a mile down the arid draw in which we found ourselves, the Professor decided to make camp. The sun was already low in the sky but as it now set from us across beyond distant Nylstrom, our shadows were long on the ground before us and the dark replicas of our strange vehicles were stencilled on the rocky floor of the valley as we pulled the machines into a rough circle and cut the motors.
    2
    For two days we followed the winding contours of the valley, every hour rising higher and higher into the mountain range, whose arms almost imperceptibly and inevitably closed in behind us until we all had the feeling that we were in a giant's grip. The wind increased daily, blowing in gusts from the heart of the range, but it did not trouble us as the desert wind, as there was little dust to obscure our view. It did, however, add to the difficulties of steering and our vehicles tended to yaw from side to side so that one wearied at the handles and muscles craved relief from the buffeting, which went on hour after hour.
    It was growing steadily colder too, though the sun shone as regularly as hitherto; this did not bother us at first but we were then aware, during our frequent halts, that the breeze was a chilly one and we were beginning to feel the benefit of the sheepskin-lined coats which was one of Scarsdale's strange-seeming requisitions for the expedition's stores. The way twisted and wound upwards and for most of the time we were steering the tractors at half-speed through mazes of gigantic boulders and among formations of weirdly striated rock.
    But there had been no major difficulties; the tractors were standing up well to the wear and tear of this difficult going and, most important of all, there had so far been no impossible places; no doubt due to Scarsdale's detailed surveying of the route on his previous journeyings. If there had been one impassable section then that would have made the Expedition untenable; apart from our using the tractors as mobile bases, there was the sheer impossibility of transporting the masses of stores and equipment along these miles of pitiless moraine.
    The territory through which we were advancing was quite featureless; black rock; boulders; stunted trees; above, a perpetually blue sky; ahead, the eternal probe of the restless wind in one's teeth and the jumble of rocks which indicated the next bend.
    We were too close in now to see what peaks lay ahead and so far as one was aware we were not high enough for snow. Scarsdale still continued in his mysterious and inscrutable way. Though his charts, log books and tables of weird hieroglyphs multiplied on the chart-table in the command vehicle at night, he gave no detailed hints of what we might soon expect.
    We had been several days on our journey to the plateau when I myself broached the matter one evening; he shook his head, with an enigmatic smile.
    'We are not close enough yet,' was all he would say. 'Time enough when we are within the Galleries.'
    He had with him a translation of the blasphemous book. The Ethics of Ygor, which had been typed on ordinary foolscap sheets and he would be lost for hours in its study most evenings, the smoke from his pipe curling upwards vertically in the still air of the tractor. While in the desert we had kept within the machines whenever we stopped. There was good reason for this, of course; the tractors were air- conditioned and the