Free The Great White Space by Basil Copper Page B

sand and grit constantly blown about made eating and conversation in the open air a misery.
    But here just the opposite rule obtained. Though the air was cold and the wind blew chill, whenever Scarsdale called a halt over his radio link and all three vehicles drew into a rough laager, we all of us, without anyone ever putting it into words, foregathered in the open air, lit fires and cooked our food. Huddled in our sheepskin jackets and hoarding our precious gatherings of wood we drank our nightly tea-ration and made the mountains echo with our animated talk.
    Van Damm in particular made his own attitude plain; I could read it well enough on his face, though he never put the feeling into words. We were whistling in the dark, his taut features said to me every night, as he gazed apprehensively around him at the dark rock whose jumbled surface was lit by the flickering flames of our necessarily feeble fires. We all felt it now; the mountains were closing in on us and inside the tractors the feeling was only emphasised. When we were asleep this did not matter; but until then we preferred to chat among ourselves; lounge outside; braving the wind, downing the hot sweet tea in thirsty gulps and constantly scanning what little we could see of our surroundings. But I noticed that none of us strayed outside the triangle of tractors, in which the fires formed the cheerful focal points. So far as we knew there was no wild-life in the mountains and no dangerous crevasses into which we might fall; but still we did not wander.
    Day was a different matter but even there I noticed my companions rarely ventured more than a hundred yards or so from our established camp. The only exception was Scarsdale; he was, of course, as I knew, absolutely fearless and sometimes at night he would disappear for as long as half an hour at a time, on some mysterious expedition of his own. On the first occasion this happened I was consumed with alarm and was about to call my companions when he emerged from the darkness, the small round glow of his pipe illuminating his bearded features. His notebook was in his hand and there was an excited look in his eyes, but I had learned my lesson by now and I did not venture to question him.
    But I remembered that he had traversed this way alone and with none of the advantages that we five currently enjoyed and once more I marvelled at the tenacity and endurance of the man; he had moral integrity as well as physical endurance and there were times as the weeks lengthened, that I came near to adulation of our leader. The Great Northern Expedition was certainly the highest point in my wanderings in a life not entirely devoted to mundane things, and even though the Professor's purpose remained shrouded in obscurity I felt I would have followed him almost anywhere he chose to lead us.
    We were four days traversing the gulley; towards the end the scree and the shattered boulders which lay like great shards of rock fallen from a region as remote as the moon, made progress maddeningly slow. But the tractors behaved extraordinarily well; I think each of us, underneath, harboured a fear that the motors of the machines might overheat or that breakage of vital components would strand us here. For that reason those of us who were driving nursed the vehicles along.
    It was unlikely, I reasoned, that all three of the machines would break down, but stranger things had happened; I cast my mind back to my own adventures in the Arizona Desert and Crosby Patterson's terrible and unique fate and pictured what might happen to us were we thrown on our own resources and have to return on foot. That outcome was unthinkable and I preferred instead to concentrate on my immediate duties.
    I was pleased, during the second day, when Scarsdale announced to me that he would himself take over the controls of the command tractor. This left me for other duties, not least those-of my photographic recording activities and I secured one of the best sequences