We reached the road on the evening of the eighth day, only to find it choked with drifts. Nothing had been down it for several days, so that we were forced to spend another night in the open. And in the morning Darcy couldn't go on. He'd come to the end of his strength , and he lay there, staring at me out of his red rimmed eyes, his cracked  and blackened lips drawn back from the teeth and his beard all frozen stiff with ice. " Can you make it?" he asked, and the words came out through his teeth without any movement to my feet...