Scores of passengers dozed or stared out the window at the forgettable moonscape of frozen marshes and six-foot reeds caught terminally in the middle of nowhere.

The road stretched endless and dreary before us, sometimes petering out altogether into frozen marshes or open sheets of water that had once been meadows and moors.

They came in single file, Julia, Reynolds, the Cossack and Dr. Jennings with Sandor beside him, half-helping, half-carrying him across the frozen marshes, all with their heads bent low, all except Sandor with the trudging, stumbling gait of those very close to exhaustion.

A strangely tense silence predominated, broken only by the intermittent cries of kittiwakes wheeling and diving above the frozen marshes beyond the perimeter fence, and the humming of a motor generator supplying power from one of the parked trailers.

Outside, staring across the flat expanse of frozen marshes and gray scrub, Venport didn't think their new base of operations looked like much.

Sneering with delight he climbed up on to the firm grass-covered bank and pointed back across the frozen marshes.

It rolled up and down, it broke sometimes into open clearings, old firebreaks, which were tangled and hard going, and it had rivers and game trails and frozen marshes peppered with tiny, stunted spruce.

But that reputation got blown across the frozen marshes of the Meadowlands tonight.

But the frost of the frozen marshes, the cold of these walls, the cold from the firmament penetrated me so terribly that I began to cough.