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shrieking winds that never stopped, until we came to believe that a screaming of air in violent movement was what was normal, and silence or the soft stirrings of breezes and zephyrs only what we made ourselves imagine to save our reason from present horror. And then, when the storms stopped, and we found newly deposited snows preventing our struggling progress forwards, and the snow masses fled past overhead, our space in the world seemed shrunk to no more than our group of shivering bodies, so that we were in a white room whose walls pressed in on us as we moved and that moved with us. And when the skies lifted and cleared, and we were in a high valley surrounded by tall icy peaks, there was no life but in ourselves, our few small selves huddled together there. Again we could not put up our tent on the hard ice. Night came down on us and we did not sleep, for the wonder and the splendour and the terror of the place. Overhead a black sky, with a few brilliant stars. No wind, no clouds, only silence. We crouched there, trembling, and gazed up, at this bright star and then at another, asking if this was the sun of Rohanda, the fruitful planet, or if that was; and we talked of the race that Canopus was bringing up to a level of high evolution, and we wondered how these people, who in our imaginations had everything brave and strong and good in them, would welcome us and make us at home … and we talked of how we two races, these nurslings of Canopus and ourselves, who were also the children of Canopus, their creation, would work together, and live together and become even stronger and better. And we, the three older ones, were aware of the vibrant expectation and longing of the two young ones, and we felt for them all the warm protective love that a passing generation must feel for its charges.
    How still it was through that long night, and how beautiful! The silence was so deep we could hear the small crystalline whispering of the stars. And, before dawn, when the cold was so intense our thick fleecy coats seemed to have crumbled away, leaving us naked, one of the high glittering peaks that surrounded us let out a violent cracking noise, as the icy blast bit into it, and this sound was echoed by another peak, and in a moment all the mountains seemed to be shouting and groaning and protesting with the cold. And then it was silent again, and the stars sparkled and invited. We did not believe we would survive the night, and in the first light that made everything glitter and hurt our eyes we found Nonni slow and heavy, and we pushed back the shags of fur from around his face so we could see the truth of his state: and his flesh was thin and yellow and clung to his bones, and his dark eyes had no answer in them. We were still a good way from the pole. I remembered that there had been a cave not far from here, and we carried him to it. He was so light he lay in my arms like a child. The cave had a small entrance, a hole in the snow; and there was no guano there. The floor was a hard greyish mixture of soil and frost, and we had no sense of animals watching from the cave’s recesses. We found piles of straw from – we supposed – the habitation of a solitary or a hermit, and with this we made a bit of a fire. But there was not enough warmth to save Nonni, and he died. And we could not bury him, for the floor was too hard. We left him there, in his thick pelts, and we four, wondering which of us would be next, went on with this journey of ours that we believed useless and perhaps even criminal, until we saw ahead of us a tall black spiring thing. It was the column that Canopus had asked us to erect at the place of the pole. But it was not as high as we remembered it, for the ice had reached more than half way up it. The columns were at the poles because the spacecraft of Canopus found them useful as markers when they came in to land.
    It seemed to us that the sun here at the top of our world was hotter than anywhere on