Life Raft - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 114

have to pull down my trousers to pee within sight of staff at
the base, bottle or no. I waited until I was as close as I dared
before stopping for what I hoped would be my last loo break.
Moving off again, the station was so close that I could see
sunlight reflecting from its windows and a flash of light that
I decided must be a camera flash. I noticed the cloud that
had been behind me slowly creep over the sun, making me
shiver and almost instantly flattening the contrast. The air
between me and the South Pole grew hazy, so that the edges
of everything appeared watery and washed out, like abstract
watercolours. The station was strangely quiet. I hadn't seen
a single vehicle.
I stopped dead in horror.
I was close enough to see that this wasn't the Amundsen-
Scott station at all.
Tears of frustration rose instantly and I felt a sense of
desperation more vengeful than during my very first few hours
alone. It was like I was right back on the Leverett Glacier. As
the cloud thickened around me, reducing the visibility with the
sure determination of a dimming switch, I saw that my dark
oblong was not the South Pole, it wasn't even a building. It
was two of the immense fuel bladders dragged by the SPOT
traverse. Their rubbery skin ribbed with reinforced seams had
glinted in the sun like metal and in the empty landscape they
had looked much bigger, than they were in reality. They had
been abandoned in the snow by the convoy, still bloated with
fuel, presumably for storage until they were needed. Like a
tourist pictured holding up Big Ben or squishing the Eiffel
Tower with their thumb, it was a trick of scale and perspective.
A bad navigator forces their surroundings to fit a map in order
to prove they are going in the right direction. I had ignored