Excerpt from 72 Below Zero by Vladimir Sanin, translated from Russian

The train was edging through Antarctica.

Six crawlers were hitched to sledges. Headed by Kharkovchanka, they were moving in the rut tamped by earlier trains. The falling night covered Antarctica with twilight, thus the snow, dazzling white just hours ago, now had become a shade of charcoal. The crawlers, the rut, the sky above, and millions of square miles of the sleepy continent were all charcoal-grey. Just dim starlight, when it pierced clouds hanging above the ice dome, and sparks flying out of the exhaust pipes, let one see Kharkovchanka’s orange sides and whimsically painted walls of the living sledge trailers.

It was a perfectly ordinary crawler-and-sledge train, of the kind that plows Antarctica year after year, delivering cargo from Mirny to Vostok and returning back. Nine hundred miles each way, forty days up, about thirty days down – there’s nothing to it. A hard voyage, but on the beaten route, its every foot known.

But no train had ever come back from Vostok during polar autumn.

Everything has to be done for the first time. Someone ought to be the first. Since the dawn of humankind, somebody had to start, try out, discover. So it had happened that ten men were the first to drive Kharkovchanka and five prime movers in Antarctic autumn.

A crawler flinched suddenly and halted, then another one stopped and finally all of them. People trudged to the stalled vehicle. They paced slowly and clumsily, in a lopsided way. Yet the gait was not unusual, for up on the ice dome one shouldn’t walk fast, since the oxygen level is as low as atop Elbrus, and the air is as dry as in an African desert. And their gait was lopsided because of the wind stinging the men's faces despite helmet liners covering all but eyes.

The men stopped by the crawler, speaking softly. They examined the stalled engine without rush, figured out that the oil duct’s rubberized hose had cracked, brought a new hose and replaced the broken one. After taking counsel together, they twisted the cistern cap open and scooped thick mush from inside, until a barrel was half filled with it. Then they lit a fire with scrap wood and warmed the barrel up on the fire. A while later, the mush was thawing out and smelling of diesel; it was time to link the barrel and the fuel tank with a hose pipe. The engine hadn’t truly cooled down, so it could be started fast, in just an hour. Having completed the repair, the men scattered to their vehicles and continued the journey – Kharkovchanka ahead, others trailing her.

From the nearest habitation, Vostok station, they were separated by three hundred miles of snow desert, and by six hundred miles – from Mirny, their destination.

The ten men were as lonely as if on the Moon. Nobody in the world could have helped them: neither people would come, nor planes would fly there.

The thermometer was stuck at seventy-two degrees Celsius below zero…