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She hacked the chocolate bar in two with her knife and they chipped off bits to eat. They let it melt in their mouths and then took a little snow to make more juice. It was so sweet as to make Uglik almost sick. It started Pakti's hiccups again. The intermittent thunder of crashing ice began again, not close, but from a different direction. This afternoon most of the noises seemed to come from the north ard now they came from behind them: south-east, the source of the wind, and the sounds were therefore louder. Pakti grabbed his arm fiercly as they listened when a particularly heavy, reverberating crack was followed by a shriek so loud as to hurt his ears. First the crack, distant and throbbing as an iron door slammed in an empty cave, then the shriek of tortured monstrous hinges as it swung open again. Always doors opening and closing, always strangers with blank eyes, jostling, invisible but screaming, in the blank mist.
Alexander Knox, Night of the White Bear, Macmillan, 1971, p. 132.
TIME: 20th C.
PLACE: the far north, Canada?
CIRCUMSTANCE: the breaking and shifting of ice in the far north
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