The sun wheeled like a great burning ball above the eastern horizon. Each person was alone with his own private hell of thirst and pain. Hour succeeded interminable hour, the sun climbed higher and higher into the empty, windless sky. The lifeboat remained, as she had been for days, motionless on the water. Nobody moved. The slightest effort brought a panting of breath that whistled shrilly through a bone-dry mouth and cracked and blistered lips; if neither wind nor rain came within the next twenty-four hours, it wouldn't matter after that whether it came or not...

First published 1958
Twelfth Impression March 1964
© Alistair MacLean 1958

"I could half hear, half feel, a hissing tremor as the air ship gouged through the ice. Then came another convulsion and above the gale the sudden sharp sound of the crash, the grinding tearing scream of crushed metal. Then, apruptly a deep and ominous silence when the sound of the wind in the darkness was no sound at all."

...For scientist Peter Mason a Greenland nightmare had just begun.

First published 1959
First issued in Fontana Books 1962
Third Impression, March 1964
© Gilach A.G., 1959