I had been looking for a place to land, and decided to take a chance on the broad plateau at the top of the northern end of the mountain chain. Here the rocks were not old Laurentian but sandstone. The place we came down on was as flat as a table top and had been blown clear of snow by the wind, which had become high enough to make landing difficult. There was no shelter on the plateau, and we had to hang on to the wings of the plane to steady it.
Finally we reached a little rocky valley. It was really only a depression in the surface of the mountain, but it was deep enough to shelter the plane and us from the increasing fury of the wind. We anchored the plane as well as we could, and then made a breakfast on canned beans.
"What next?" asked Jim when we had finished. "Maybe you'd better try to get some sleep while I watch."
I shook my head. "We'll both try to sleep now. There's nothing to watch for, and tonight we'll probably both want to be awake."
We crawled into our sleeping bags and the last thing I remember was the thought that the increasingly shrill screeching of the wind was an improvement on the noise made by the sirens of the New York Fire Department.
I do not know what wakened me. I instinctively looked at my watch and saw it was three o'clock. At first I was not sure whether I was awake or whether I was in the middle of one of the half-waking nightmares we sometimes have. Lying in the depression in the mountain, I could see neither horizon but only the sky overhead. I rubbed my eyes and looked again.
Nearer and Nearer
Instead of the usual blue, the sky was a burnished copper. The wind was blowing a hurricane with a steady intensity from east to west. All aviators are able to judge wind velocities pretty accurately, but this was something entirely beyond my experience. I had felt a hundred-and-fifty mile an hour gale during the Miami hurricane, but this was vastly greater.
I could see flickering shadows overhead and it took me some time to realize that they were solid objects carried by the wind. In addition to the shrieking wind like an enormous siren, there was now a steady roar like thunder in the mountains. I crawled out of my sleeping bag and shivered to the intense cold. When we went to sleep the thermometer I judge was about twenty above. Now I knew it must be away below zero.