"He could land to the south, into the wind." Joss sounded almost desperate. "It's a billiard table there."

"He could, but he won't." I had to shout the words to make myself heard above the wind. "He's nobody's fool. He knows if he lands to windward of us, even a hundred yards to windward, the chances of finding our lights, our cabin, in this weather just don't exist. He's got to land upwind. He's just got to."

There was a long silence as we staggered forward, head and shoulders bent almost to waist ievel against the wind and ice-filled drift, then Joss moved close again.

"Maybe he'll see the hummocks in time. Maybe he can—"

"He'll never see them," I said flatly. "Flying into this stuff he can't possibly see a hundred yards in front of him."

The radio antenna, rime-coated now to almost fifty times its normal size, sagging deeply and swaying pendulum-like in the wind between each pair of fourteen-foot poles that supported it, stretched away almost 250 feet to the north. We were following the line of this, groping our way blindly from pole to pole and almost at the end of the line, when the roar of the aircraft engines, for the last few seconds no more than a subdued murmur in the night as the wind carried the sound from us, suddenly swelled and increased to a deafening crescendo as I shouted a warning to the others and flung myself flat on the ground: the huge dark shape of the airliner swept directly over us even as I fell. I would have sworn, at the time, that I could have reached out and touched it with my hand, but it must have cleared us by at least ten feet—the antenna poles, we later discovered, were undamaged.

Like a fool, I immediately leapt to my feet to try to get a bearing on the vanishing plane and was literally blown head over heels by the tremendous slipstream from the four great propellers, slid helplessly across the frozen crust of the snow and fetched up on my back almost twenty feet from where I had been standing.