Life Raft - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 131

cooling air. The view through the door as I sat cross-legged
next to the stove made me sigh deeply and stare. Distant clouds
sat like coils of wire on the horizon and refracted the sunlight
so that they shimmered with the iridescence of oil on water.
The snow beneath was brindled with the irregular shadows
of shallow sastrugi. Sucking at a gloopy coffee fortified with
protein powder, gazing at the achingly serene landscape
framed by my tent door, I tried to imagine what it would feel
like to return home without having crossed Antarctica. The
thought of failure wasn't an easy one. I had never set out on
an expedition and not returned successful to some degree. On
a personal level, one of the main reasons I had wanted to cross
Antarctica alone was to find out where my limits lay. If I failed
because I had found those limits by being unable to continue
for mental or physical reasons I would, at least, be returning
home with some kind of answer. To fail because I had run out
of time was a failure by logistics and as such, answered nothing.
I would be left with the same question I had arrived with and
that would be the bitter pill, the true failure. I couldn't imagine
ever wanting to repeat this journey and so the question would
likely always remain unanswered. This was my one and only
opportunity and it would be wasted.
My mind floated northward beyond the horizon I could see,
over the degrees and the miles that I had watched so memorably
from the air. My thoughts rested on the Thiel Mountains
that were less than five degrees of latitude away (thinking in
degrees of latitude was more manageable than thinking in
miles, kilometres or even days - the numbers were smaller). I
could picture the flat-topped profile of the mountain range, the
caps of ice sitting on squat buttes looking like elevated islands,
each cap forming a lost world of white protected by the dark