It seemed then, as we turned to go back, that in front of us the whole sky had become a wall or cliff of frozen water, for it was stifling white from the zenith to our feet, and as we stared forward into it we could see nothing, not even the towering breaking crest of the wall. Many of us were thinking that there was no purpose in walking back into that freezing smother of white, that inevitable death. But we did walk on, and on, and when we came to the first cluster of little ice huts, and crawled into one, coughing and blinking our eyes because of the greasy smoke from the burning fat, a face appeared from the heap of skins, and a voice said: 'Someone came. It is time the Representatives went down to the pole. It is summer again there.' And the speaker coughed, and the face went again in the dimness, under a shaggy sleeve, and we crawled out backwards along the ice tunnel, and stood all together in a hollow in the storm, and thought of the blue flowers and soft sappy greens of the summer that had gone. We found the sledges that had had the dead sea-things on them, and we sent messengers up into the blizzards to say that supplies of the magical blue plant were being sought for - and fifty of us Representatives travelled down, down, to seek for the summer. Again we travelled in the low space between a pressing white smother of cloud and the billowing white of the land, the wind at our backs, and again we huddled together through the dark nights, inside caves of snow we made for ourselves as the light went. And it seemed to us that the dreadful dark of the nights was shorter, and we felt that soon we would reach the summer lands. We were looking ahead, as we reached each rise or hill, with all the strength of our eyes and our minds, trying to penetrate the obliterating white, to see if there, at last, the sky would show a gleam of blue, or even of a lighter grey. But then we knew that we had passed beyond where, last season, the snows had ended and the open tundra had begun. Still snow encompassed us. Still we laboured on till from the top of a mountain, we saw the pillar, or spire, or column that marked the pole, and around it, but not for very far, was the greyish green of the moorland. And there were no flowers, no plant life, at all. Nor was there any sign of the herds. But we did not have the moral energy to wonder about the herds, for what we were facing, we knew, was the end of the planet. This was where we had, finally, to accept the end of our shifts and contrivances and our long endurances. When we reached where the snow became thin, or lay in wet yellowish banks and shoals, like coarse damp sand, and became only streaks and spots on soaked grass and on bogs - there we settled ourselves, trying to feel that the distant sun had some strength in it. We looked ahead across a day's walking distance to the tall column, and all we could see was the dark earth with sometimes a little dull green, or a smear or stain of grey.

We had very little to eat, only a few pieces of dried meat. But we did not want to eat. It was as if, while we few waited there, not knowing what we were to think or plan for, we had already gone beyond the need to eat, or to work for sustenance, or to maintain our pitifully depleted and deprived bodies that shivered inside the dense hide coats we had not removed - for it was not warm enough to do without them. Our eyes were drawn to the tall slender spire of the column that Canopus had set there, and had used for so long as a guide for their craft. Its absolute perfection of proportion, its balance, even the way it had been set in a certain relation to the slope of hills and the sky, spoke of Canopus, Canopus - and not of this planet; and what was in all our minds as we waited there, gazing at the thing, was only Canopus, who was coming to save us.

Yet I knew very well that there were no space-fleets coming in - I knew it now as I had not before, with a quiet and definite conviction, which was giving birth to - yes, hope; but of a kind that was unfamiliar to me. To believe, as we had, and for so long, or at least with part of our minds, that one day our skies would flash and shine everywhere as they filled with the Canopean fleets, and that then all our suffering populations would find safety 'in the stars' - that was a resting on the future. But it was not a future that had a continuance with our past. It was a real and complete change that took place in me then, as I finally relinquished the old hope and dream, and looked steadily at the perfection of that tall black spire there, which still reflected lights from the sky, just as our wall had once done when it was clean and unfrosted. Inside me was some small spring of strength and self-reliance that I felt to be indestructible, and becoming stronger. This strength was what I was - I, Doeg; and across it, as clouds or birds traverse a sky not changing it at all, went thoughts and emotions. Among them, but very faint and even rather ridiculous was the familiar: One day Canopus will come and save us... And it seemed that when I looked into the faces of my friends, faces known to me as well as my own; into their eyes, which sometimes seemed to me as much mine as theirs - that I was seeing there what I knew to be true of myself. Even as one might say: 'Perhaps they will come tomorrow!' and another answered: 'Or the day after, or next week - the summer still has days or weeks to live!' - it seemed that these words were coming out of a superficial part of them, and that they were not even fully aware of what they said. I could see from their eyes that their minds were occupied with quite other kinds of thought, or speculation, or - even - conviction.

It is a very remarkable thing how ideas come into a mind, or minds: one minute we are thinking this or that, as if no other thought is possible to us; shortly after, there are quite different beliefs and possibilities inside our heads. Yet how did they get there? How do they arrive, these new notions, thoughts, ideas, beliefs, dispossessing the old ones, and to be dispossessed, of course, soon enough in their turn?

I knew, as we all waited shivering inside our coats, with the faint pale sunlight on our faces, that while my companions muttered: Canopus will come, we shall be saved - and the other shreds and pieces of our old dreams - changes were going on inside them that they were not conscious of.

And so we stayed there, being together on the hillside that had patches of grass and low tough plants on it, with the snowy lands behind us from where drove harsh and bitter winds. Nor did any of us show any disposition to move, or to talk of our responsibilities to our populations, or to discuss what we ought to do - whether to go in search of the vanished herds, or to send messages about their disappearance, or any of the other things that normally would have driven us up and into activity.

We were watching not only the dreary spaces of moor and tundra around the column but, more than these, each other. Increasingly, our eyes were on each other, searchingly, patiently - as if we did not know every one of us, as in fact we did; so very well that we could at any moment take on each other's work and - in a sense - become each other. We gazed close into eyes and faces as if there was very much more to be learned there than we had ever believed. And, soon, we were all in a rough circle, looking in and not out at the little spaces of our 'summer'. We faced inwards, as if the truth available to us was there, between us... in us... among us. In our being there together, in that way, in our extremity.

And so, later, were we found by Alsi and Johor who came out of the white wilderness towards us, showing by the way they stumbled and slid over the roughnesses of the ground how exhausted they were. And they flung themselves down among us, and lay there, eyes closed. And we saw how the yellow skin stretched over the bones of their faces.