IX

Accident

IF THIS WAS death, I thought, then it was a lot more painful than being dead is commonly supposed to be. I opened my eyes, but could see nothing but a swirling whiteness. There was an intolerable weight across my chest. I ached all over, but found by experiment that I could move my fingers. My left hand was in a glove and still quite warm, but my right hand was gloveless and rapidly getting frozen. Using arms and shoulders I tried twice to shift the weight from my chest, and couldn’t. But unless I were dead and this was some peculiar form of hell I couldn’t stay where I was. Making a tremendous effort I pushed and heaved and wriggled until the weight was across my stomach, then my thighs, and at last I was free. I could kneel, and stayed on my knees for a time, panting. Then I got to my feet, at first swaying groggily, but steadying after a minute or two. As my eyes became accustomed to the murk of fog that engulfed me I could see a few yards. The weight across my chest was in the snow beside me – it was a bit of one of the blades from the helicopter’s rotor. Wreckage was everywhere. I thought despairingly that I was the only one to have survived the crash, and knew that I could not survive long.

Then I heard a faint call, more a sort of moan than a call. Groping my way in the fog I stumbled over a body, practically buried in snow. I scraped the snow away with my hands and found that it was Keller, still alive and, after I had dragged him from the snow, able to talk. ‘Who is it?’ he asked.

‘Peter. We’ve had a crash, and God knows if there’s anybody else alive. I’m bruised all over, but I don’t think anything’s broken. What about you?’

He moved first his head, then his arms, then his legs. ‘I think I’m probably undamaged,’ he said. ‘I suppose the snow saved me. But I can’t get a grip on anything. If you can give me a hand I’ll try to stand.’

He was badly shaken, but determination, and such help as I could give, got him to his feet. He even managed a faint grin, which distorted as it was by the mist, was cheering. ‘Well, there are two of us, anyway,’ he said. ‘The first thing we’ve got to do is to see if there’s anyone else.’

I was sickened about Ruth – it was my fault that she was here. Search seemed hopeless. As far as we could make out the helicopter had crashed into a mountain, and the slope on which we were trying to stand was excessively steep. The two of us were in a narrow gully filled with snow. Keller seemed able to think more clearly than I could. ‘It’s no use looking uphill – if there’s anybody alive they’ll have rolled down,’ he said.

The mist seemed thinning a little. It was daylight, about four o’clock in the afternoon, and what had wrecked us was the sudden swirl of fog. In theory we had been flying at a height sufficient to clear all known peaks, but the whole region was so remote and desolate that it was not easy at any given moment to make out precisely where we were. Perhaps something had gone wrong with the helicopter’s instruments; perhaps we had struck a mountain whose very existence was unknown. None of that mattered now – our concern was to see if we could find any other survivors.

The first place to look was in the wreckage itself, and in the twisted body of the helicopter we found three of our companions, the two pilots and one of the Hamburg policemen. All were dead, and appeared to have been killed instantly. In the pocket of the flying suit worn by one of the pilots I found a pair of gloves. It was vital to me to have a glove for my right hand, so I took them.

As far as we could make out the helicopter had struck a rock face on the mountainside. Keller and I were alive because we had been flung out into soft snow. Neither Ruth nor the other Hamburg man was in the wreckage, so presumably they also had been flung out. But where?

We began a systematic search downhill. I call it ‘systematic’ because we tried to follow a system of keeping on the same line of slope about ten yards apart, but it didn’t work because the ground was so broken. We worked down the gully that had saved us but could see nothing but snow. There was another gully running roughly parallel to ours and about thirty yards to the right of it. Here I found Ruth, bleeding from a cut on her forehead, unconscious, but still alive. Between us we got her out of the snow and carried her to a small platform of more or less level ground a little below the wreckage. Whatever had struck her on the forehead had knocked her out, but the cut did not seem too bad and I bandaged it with a handkerchief. Soon after I had got the bandage on she came to. ‘Lord, it’s cold,’ she said. It was scarcely an inspiring speech, but I doubt if any words ever spoken have sounded lovelier. I put my arms round her to warm her as well as I could, taking care not to press on anything that might be broken. She snuggled up to me, and like Keller, she managed a smile. ‘I can wriggle my toes, and my fingers,’ she said. ‘I think I’m all right.’

While I was looking after Ruth, Keller found the second Hamburg man. With us he had been thrown out of the helicopter but he had not been lucky. Instead of being thrown into snow he had been hurled against a rock and his neck broken.

With all the crew accounted for we took stock of the position. ‘I don’t know how long we were lying in the snow before we recovered ourselves, but I don’t think it can have been long,’ Keller said. ‘Say ten minutes to a quarter of an hour – if it had been much longer I should think we’d have suffered from frostbite, your hand, anyway. My watch is still going, and I looked at it when we started our search. That was just on forty minutes ago. So it will be roughly an hour since the crash. The people at Gould Bay will be worried to be out of radio communication with the helicopter, but radio doesn’t always work well in these high latitudes, and they won’t necessarily expect disaster. If the crash happened about an hour ago we’d been up for about three quarters of an hour. We gave no estimated time of return because we were going to search, but they’ll expect us back within four hours or so. That’s about two hours from now. When we don’t come back they’ll begin to get very worried indeed, but they will think we’ve probably made an emergency landing somewhere, with our radio out of action. The big transport plane is not an ideal search aircraft, but I should think it almost certain that they’ll go up to have a look for us. And they’ll radio for another helicopter. It will be at least a day before it can be flown out, but the big plane should have spotted us by then. It can’t land anywhere near us, of course, but they can send down some help by parachute. It seems to me our best course is to stay by the wreckage and hope to be rescued.’

‘I agree, but I don’t know how long we should stay here. At this time of year there is virtually no darkness, so as soon as the fog clears we’ve a chance of being spotted. But the fog that wrecked us may wreck our chances. I think we should stay here for twenty-four hours and if we’ve seen no aircraft by then we shall have to reconsider things. The first job is to see what we can find in the wreckage in the way of food and shelter.’

The helicopter had been well supplied with a day’s food for seven people, and in addition carried emergency ration packs that would last the three of us for several weeks. The problem was whether we could find any of it. To my relief Ruth was fit enough to join the search, and it was she who discovered a big carton of ration packs half-buried in the snow of the gully where she had fallen. That solved the immediate problem of food. There were rations for twelve men for forty-eight hours, including two dozen cans of self-heating soup.

The helicopter had not caught fire in the crash, so her stores were more or less intact, though scattered over a wide area of snow-covered broken ground. The pilot’s cabin had taken the full force of the crash and the instruments were shattered – compass, navigating instruments, radio, all useless. However, my wrist compass seemed to be undamaged, and Keller had a pocket compass. The two more or less agreed with one another, so we assumed that they were probably all right.

We were wearing our small automatic pistols, and several of the rifles that had been on board seemed usable. There was also a box of ammunition, and although the box was broken the cartridges packed inside were unharmed. So we were well off for firearms, though what we needed more was a spade. We had nothing in the way of a tent, and shelter of some sort was imperative. Both Keller and I had served in the army and been on survival courses, although mine, many years ago, had been no farther north than Scotland. Keller, however, had been on a course in northern Norway and he thought that he could build a snow house if we had a spade. We didn’t, but I remembered the broken rotor blade which had fallen across me and I thought that this might serve. It was not ideal because it was too long but it could be used after a fashion, and while Keller got to work trying to make rough blocks of snow Ruth and I searched the wreckage for smaller pieces of metal. We found several, all of which made better digging tools than my original rotor blade. Keller showed us what to do and a circular snow house began to take shape. The walls rose quite satisfactorily, but the snow was too soft for good building blocks and after two or three attempts at a roof it was obvious that we were not going to win. Bits and pieces of wreckage solved the problem. We used them to make a framework for the roof of our house, and then covered and packed the frame with snow – important for insulation to conserve the heat of our bodies inside the house.

The work kept us warm and when our house was finished we were rather proud of it. We had not thought about food while getting on with our building work, but with the house usable we felt ravenously hungry. We were also thirsty, but although we had food we had no water, and for the moment no means of melting snow. The helicopter had carried a small tank of water, but that had gone in the crash. We had matches and I thought that we might get a fire going from burnable wreckage; the fuel tanks had burst and the fuel spilled out, though there were dregs left to ignite what could be burned. But we didn’t want to use what was burnable in case we needed a fire to attract the attention of rescuers. For our first meal we had to try to quench thirst with soup, and afterwards by taking mouthfuls of snow. We could survive on snow, but it is a poor substitute for drinking water. We filled the empty soup cans with snow and put them between our legs in the hope that the heat from our bodies would melt the stuff. We got a miserable amount of greyish water from our soup cans in the end, and it was a slow job, one of the problems being that our admirable cold-weather clothing was so well insulated that little body heat got through it. This was invaluable for keeping warm, but an obstacle to snow melting.

There were some lifejackets in the emergency equipment carried by the helicopter. We laid these over the trodden snow that formed the floor of our hut and they made it quite comfortable to sit or lie on.

It wasn’t until we’d eaten that the horror of things really struck us. We’d been kept going by having work to do, and collecting what seemed useful from the wreck. Now we had time to think. There were four more deaths, two pilots and two policemen, to be added to the sickening roll of human suffering brought about in some way by an obscure theory of Arctic climatology. For most of that night, never dark enough to hide the wreckage of the helicopter, we scarcely bothered about our own situation: we thought only of the sudden ending to four good and useful lives, and of the suffering it must bring to four more human families. I felt a particularly savage responsibility. These men had died because of my thinking – suppose I was wrong? Suppose there was nothing to find in this Arctic wilderness – that Dr Braunschweig and his boat were on their way to the South Seas for some reason that none of us had guessed at. Suppose . . .

But this was morbid futility. Like soldiers these men had died carrying out their duty, and if my thinking was wrong it had been wrong in good faith. And I hadn’t sent men to their deaths without going with them – it was blind chance, or some strange dispensation of Providence, that Keller, Ruth and I were not lying with them on the snow-covered hillside. If I went on giving way to self-pity it was more than likely that our joining the dead would merely be delayed. We had to have some plan of action, to save ourselves and, if possible, to carry on the fight.

Ruth and Keller slept or dozed through some of that awful night, which was why I was left to my own miserable thoughts. Around six in the morning I opened three more cans of our self-heating soup, the only means we had of getting a hot drink. It went down well, and I was thankful to have companions to talk to again.

‘What do you think we ought to do now?’ Ruth asked.

‘It’s hard, but I’m sure the right thing is to do nothing for a bit,’ I said. ‘Our best hope is that they’ll send up the big plane to look for us. The helicopter is at least twelve hours overdue by now, and they’ll realise that there must have been a disaster. I don’t know how visible the wreckage is, but we can collect materials for a fire, and light it the moment we see or hear a plane. That had better be the next job. Do either of you want any more breakfast? There seems quite a good variety of biscuits and tinned meats, also some honey and jam.’

Ruth said she didn’t think she could eat anything but Keller and I decided that we should all eat to keep up our strength, and we persuaded Ruth to join us at least to the extent of consuming a biscuit spread with honey. After breakfast we got to work, collecting everything burnable from the wreck, and salvaging the broken bottom of a fuel tank which still had several gallons in it. We brought the fuel to our bonfire, but kept it in the broken tank until we were ready to light it.

The fog had gone with the night, and it was a clear morning. From our height on the peak that had wrecked the helicopter we could see over most of the landscape. There was another fairly high peak a mile or so to the west and there were distant mountains to the east and south, but northwards the land seemed to fall away in a ragged series of crevasses. ‘We’re fairly well placed for being spotted,’ Keller said. ‘Our peak and the one near it must stand out for miles.’

That was comforting, but no sight or sound of an aircraft came to justify our hopes. The hours dragged on, and at midday I thought we should do what we could to attract attention. ‘Let’s take some of the stuff from our bonfire and make a smaller pile,’ I suggested. ‘The filling from some of the lifejackets should make a good smoke. A column of smoke will be visible to an aeroplane for much farther than we could see the speck of a plane in the sky.’

We used about a quarter of our burnable material, poured a few pints of fuel on it, and set it alight with a match thoughtfully provided with our emergency rations, although both Keller and I carried matches of our own. The fire blazed up well, and there was a satisfactory pillar of black smoke from the lifejackets. We filled our empty soup tins with ice and snow, and put them by the edge of the blaze to melt. When we had a fair quantity of water I boiled some of it in a couple of tins to make coffee from a packet in our rations. It had a curious taste, but it was hot, and a change from soup.

We scanned the skies anxiously while our fire burned, but saw nothing. We were tempted to keep the fire going by putting on more of our precious burnable stuff, arguing that it would be silly to waste the fire if a few more minutes might lead to our being seen. Self-discipline prevailed, however, and we let the fire sink into ashes without attempting to prolong it. We were bitterly disappointed, and a lot more worried than we allowed ourselves to show.

Worry, and every other thought, were shattered by a sudden scream from Ruth. She had gone about fifty yards along a narrow side-gully running to the left of our snow hut for a piece of necessary privacy and we could not see her, but her scream told us where she was. It was not a shout of elation on seeing an aeroplane, it was a cry of panic. Keller and I rushed towards her, some instinct prompting me to grab one of the rifles we had collected from the wreck as I jumped up.

It was as well. As we rounded a slight bend in the gully we saw Ruth cowering against a snow-covered rock, with a huge polar bear standing over her, one of its great forepaws raised about to strike. Keller, who was brought up to use a pistol, fired from the hip. At almost the same moment I sent two rounds from the rifle into the beast’s head. In our sickening anxiety all action seemed to be delayed, like a cinema film in slow motion. It looked as if nothing had happened. The bear still towered over Ruth, the huge menacing paw stayed suspended. But its force, thank God, had gone. The animal swayed a little, then slowly keeled over, falling not more than a foot or so to one side of where Ruth was huddled against the rock. It was a miracle that it did not fall on top of her – goodness knows how much it weighed.

Keller pumped a few more pistol shots into the huge body to make sure of things, while I put my arms round Ruth and helped her to her feet. She clung to me, breathing in short quick gasps, then straightened the hood of her anorak and said, ‘What a sight I must look! Oh, Peter, thank God you came – and thank you both for being so quick. It came absolutely from nowhere. I was just tidying myself up when I saw it standing over me. Oh, Peter, do you think there are any more of them?’

I know little of the habits of polar bears, but it seemed likely that where there was one there might be others. ‘I don’t know, but we should be all right with the rifles handy,’ I said. ‘And we’ll make one rule now – no one goes away from the camp, even for a few yards, without a rifle guard.’

*

The adventure with the bear at least took our minds off our own plight, but anxieties soon came back. As the day dragged into evening we speculated endlessly on what might be happening. ‘It seems extraordinary that they haven’t sent the aeroplane to look for us,’ Keller said. ‘Of course, we don’t know what conditions are like at Gould Bay – there may be dense fog, or heavy snow, or something else to make it impossible for the plane to take off.’

‘Yes, and they’ve no idea where to look for us. We must have been miles off course. Both the pilot and co-pilot put in a lot of time studying the map, and if they’d expected high ground we’d never have hit the mountain. Either the map is wrong, or we weren’t anywhere near where we thought we were. Visibility was practically nil, and in this part of the world it’s easy for compasses to go haywire.’

There could be plenty of reasons for the failure to find us, though apart from giving us something to think about there wasn’t really much point in speculating on them. We should have to decide for ourselves what we were going to do.

‘I think we should stay here for one more night, and if nothing has happened by morning we should try to find our own way out,’ I said. ‘We’re not badly equipped. We have good clothing, we have rations for some time, and we have weapons. We can take a few soup cans of fuel with us to have some means of doing a bit of cooking, though we must take care to keep a reserve for making a flare. If we can cook, we can get fresh meat from the bear – I believe Eskimos set great store by bear meat. The problem is to decide where we should try to make for.’

‘How far do you reckon we are from the base at Gould Bay?’ Keller asked.

‘Frankly, I haven’t the least idea. We may be a hundred miles, or we may have flown round in circles in the fog and be within twenty or thirty. There are some navigation tables in the helicopter, but I’ve been able to find only one sextant, and that is smashed to bits.’

‘Probably there was only one. It would be carried mainly for emergencies since almost all navigation nowadays is by radio.’

‘And the radio is beyond repair . . . We must go back to first principles and see if we can get even the roughest estimate of where we are. At least the charts are more or less undamaged.’

I fetched the charts from what was left of the pilots’ cabin and we spread them out on a flat topped rock. They were good for the coast, but rather non-committal inland. High ground was shown, and some peak heights indicated, but it was impossible to relate heights shown on the map to the broken landscape round us. What was clear was that there should have been no peaks as high as that which had wrecked us within many miles of the route we were supposed to be flying from Gould Bay to the northern end of the Robeson Channel. We were so far north that it was difficult to work out bearings. Keller’s prismatic compass and my little wrist compass agreed with each other, more or less, but how their readings related to true north it was impossible to guess. The sun, still visible, was the best help here. Lacking a sextant we could do no more than estimate an angle for the sun, but our watches were still going, and taking a mean of the three of them we made a guess at G.M.T. From the navigation tables Ruth calculated where the sun should be at our estimated time, and this gave us a reasonable guess at the cardinal points of the compass.

Having satisfied ourselves where to look east or west we went back to the chart. The Robeson Channel runs roughly from north-east to south-west and what we thought of as the northern end was more properly the north-eastern end. We assumed that we were north of the channel itself – flying blind in fog we might have crossed the strait and be somewhere in northern Greenland instead of on Ellesmere Island, but that would have taken us even farther astray than we thought probable. We had to make some assumptions and we assumed that we were still north of the Robeson Channel.

‘Presumably we’re somewhere north of Gould Bay, but whether to the east or west of it is anybody’s guess,’ Keller said.

‘Yes. And I think it would be madness to try to get back there – we’ve no idea how far it is, nor which way to walk.’ I was poring over the map. ‘Our best bet is to try to find the coast,’ I went on. ‘As long as we keep going south with a bit of east in it we’re bound to reach the coast, and maybe we can identify something on the chart and work out where we are. The sea is a lot kindlier than this awful wilderness, and on the coast we can hope to find some driftwood to make a fire, for cooking, or signalling. We might get another bear, or we might manage to harpoon a fish – there’s hope of life on the coast that there isn’t here.’

Keller and Ruth agreed. ‘If we can find out roughly where we are, we’ve only got to follow the coast in one direction or another to get back to Gould Bay,’ Keller said.

‘In theory, yes, but it’s steep-to in many places, and more or less impossible to walk along for any distance,’ I said. ‘But even if it means climbing cliffs and making detours inland, we shall know what we’re doing. Everything points to trying to find the coast.

‘There’s another thing. We came here on a mission to try to locate Dr Braunschweig and to prevent whatever devilment is afoot concerning him. We may be in poor shape for an expeditionary force, but we’re alive, and I feel that we should do what we can. If our earlier reasoning was anywhere near right, we may not be very far from wherever he was going in Apfel. Time is running out for him even more than it is for us. Once on the coast we may get an idea of where to look. We owe it to our dead companions to do what we can.’

*

When should we start? Almost every reasonable consideration suggested that it would be wiser to wait for rescuers than to march off into the wilderness on our own. But twenty-four hours had passed since the crash without any sign of an air search. It seemed unlikely that a skilled crew anxious to get a plane into the sky would have been held up for a night and a day. I write ‘a night’ but it must be remembered that there was virtually no darkness. The helicopter had become overdue when there were still hours of light available for a search, and we had all expected that our position would have been located during the night.

Assume that for some reason the transport plane could not take off – the base party would have radioed for assistance, and air help could have come from Greenland, northern Canada or the United States. We were a long way from civilisation, but in terms of flying time we were not in any sense out of reach. Had the radio failed? For experienced operators with first-class equipment that seemed improbable, but it was possible in these extreme northern latitudes. If there had been a radio failure they would not have been worried by losing contact with the helicopter, but the helicopter would still have become physically overdue, and radio or no radio we should have expected an air search.

Prolonged silence would create anxiety for the whole of our expedition, but how long would it be before my people in London and Keller’s in Germany became sufficiently anxious to send help? We had no firm dates, no precise objective; we were hunting for Dr Braunschweig and might go almost anywhere. Search parties certainly would be sent to look for us, but not, we felt, for several days.

After the best part of two hours of discussion Keller summed up, ‘I think we should stay where we are until noon tomorrow. If there is no sign of a plane by then we must assume that something has happened which means that it’s no use going on waiting here. Let us make noon tomorrow zero hour. If we have to act then, I think Peter’s suggestion of making for the coast is the best thing we can do.’

‘The main thing now is to try to get some sleep,’ I said. ‘We must have someone on watch – let us take three hour shifts. And the watchkeeper must have a rifle and look out for polar bears as well as aeroplanes. We don’t want one of those brutes investigating our hut.’

It was getting on for seven o’clock. None of us wanted food, but food was important, so we had some more of the self-heating soup and a few of our iron-ration biscuits. We gave Ruth the first watch, which meant that she could turn in around eleven and sleep through until five. Keller took the second watch, from eleven to two, and I went on from two to five. It was almost light when I turned out, a slight dusk rapidly becoming day. I walked up and down for a bit to get some circulation going, and then took post on a rock a few yards from our ice hut.

From the rock I had a view that covered almost the whole sky, and all approaches to the hut. We took the danger from polar bears seriously and I kept my rifle handy. Nothing moved. The sky was cloudless, and I could have seen the tiniest speck of an aircraft many miles away. I checked our bonfire – several soup tins of fuel were ready to light, and I had matches in my pocket. The fire remained unlighted. It was too cold to sit still, so I patrolled the hillside round our hut, my ears alert for sound, my eyes lifting every few seconds from ground to sky. I wished I knew more about polar bears. The one that had so nearly killed Ruth was in good condition, so there must have been food even in this inhospitable land. I reflected that probably he got most of his food from the sea, and this was a comforting thought, for it suggested that the coast could not be very far away. On the other hand if bears needed the coast for food we should have to be particularly on our guard if we reached the shoreline.

My watch ended at five, and Ruth took over. I turned in for a couple of hours and dozed a little, but I was too restless to sleep. So was Keller. He got up when I came back to the hut, saying that he had had quite a good night, and would keep Ruth company. Soon after seven he was back with breakfast – a mug of ration coffee, which he had made by lighting a small fire, and a slice of corned beef on ration biscuit. After breakfast we didn’t set any more formal watches because we were all up, but we did maintain our polar bear guard by making sure that one of us always had a rifle.

We were giving the party at Gould Bay until noon, but that did not mean that we sat around doing nothing. Our survival might depend on taking the right things from the wreck: we had to carry everything we took, so we dared not take too much. The ice wilderness we had to cross was rough and broken, and to be overloaded was to invite disaster. A particular problem was that we had no rucksacks – we had not contemplated an expedition on foot. We had canvas shoulderbags, and there were some sacks in the wreckage of the helicopter, but we had no convenient means of carrying loaded sacks. We considered trying to make a sledge from the broken blades of the rotor, but decided against it. The ground was too rough for sledge-hauling. Our backs would have to do for everything.

We took iron rations for ten days, deciding that if necessary we could make them last a fortnight: if in a fortnight we had got nowhere, we should have to survive on what we could find, or – more probably – resign ourselves to death. We took four soup cans of fuel. If we came across any driftwood, a quarter of a can would be enough to start a fire, but if we could find nothing burnable the fuel would be so much deadweight, for we had no sort of cooking stove.

For clothes we had nothing but what we stood in, all Arctic kit of the highest quality, and as far as clothing went we could scarcely have been better equipped. Shelter was another matter – we had no tent, and nothing that could be used to make one. But we had contrived to build our snow-and-ice hut, and what we had done once could be done again. The problem here was what to use for digging – to carry shafts of broken metal from the wreckage would add to weight, and also be cumbersome. In the end we were lucky. Searching farther down the hillside we came across the remains of the helicopter’s toolkit, including a short trenching spade, and a sturdy machete, carried for what reason I know not, but a godsend to us. Keller and I both had pocket knives, but the machete would be enormously valuable for roughly shaping blocks of ice for building, or for cutting up driftwood, if we found any.

We decided to take a lifejacket apiece. We could walk wearing them, if we fell through the ice somewhere they might save our lives, and if we didn’t use them as lifejackets they could be opened out to form makeshift beds. We packed such charts as we had into our canvas bags.

We gave much thought to weapons. If we contrived to find Apfel we might expect a hostile reception from Dr Braunschweig’s captors. We might be outnumbered and we should have to play that as it came, using our wits rather than weight of armament. Weight was the operative consideration. Pistols we should have to carry, but did we need rifles? On the whole we thought not, but there was the problem of possible encounters with polar bears – against a massive bear a rifle was a more reliable weapon than a pistol. In the end we decided to take one rifle and sixty rounds –sixty because it divided conveniently into carrying twenty rounds apiece.

We had a sad duty to perform as we made our preparations for departure. We had hoped that rescuers would be able to recover the bodies of our companions so that they could be taken home for burial, and while we still believed that a rescue party would ultimately come we could no longer be certain. We could not simply leave our companions as they lay, but it was hard to know what best to do about them. The frozen ground made it impossible to dig graves, and while we feared that bears might ravage the hillside once we had gone we could see no way of protecting the bodies. In the end we laid them side by side, said a brief prayer, and covered them with snow. At the head of the mound of snow we built a cairn of small rocks and stones, and in the cairn we placed a tin containing the names of the dead and a brief record of what had happened, written on pages from our notebooks. We left the record in English and German.

‘Zero hour,’ Keller said.