No escape from the cold belly of this ice this year". The sailors realise the ice isn't going to melt enough to free their ships during the summer of 1847, that "there would be no release from this belly of the Leviathan winter this summer. One hundred days of night." What a horrifying thought. In a few days, there would be no real day at all, only arctic night. "Messages were passed between the ships now only during those dwindling minutes of half-light around noon. "To go out on the frozen sea in the dark now with that … thing … waiting in the jumble of pressure ridges and tall sastrugi was certain death," he writes. He adds in another, more deliberate evil: a stalking, polar bear-like monster which tracks over the icy wastelands around the ships, picking the men off one by one. Skilfully, horribly, Simmons details the months of darkness – the temperatures of -50F and lower the shrieking groans of the ice the wind the hunger – from the multiple perspectives of the men on board the ship, and with such detail that I defy readers not to grab another jumper.
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