Bald-Headed Men - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 140

needing to look at my compass so often. All day I lunged
through the thick weather toward the sun, my eyes fixed on
what was sometimes no more than a barely perceptible white
glow behind dirty, cotton wool clouds, like the remnants of
a tiny ember buried deep within a long-dead fire. I watched
nervously as the smoky cloud repeatedly thickened around
my guiding light, threatening to blot it from view completely.
Each time the sun faded from sight my mental muscles tensed
in dread that it had gone for good and yet I would march
forward in stubborn belief that the light would return - and
it always did. No matter how thick the cloud became, the sun
would fight its way through even if only as the slightest of
glimmers. It seemed that my desperation to keep sight of the
sun was matched by the determination of the sun to get at least
a scintilla of light through to me. It was as if it understood
that I needed the physical connection, a sightline between us
to give me the impetus to keep going, a representation of hope
that I clung to pathetically. I imagined the sun battling to find
a way through the weather, prising apart the clouds with its
immense strength just to let me know that it was still there, to
give me faith that the weather was only temporary, to make
sure I knew I wasn't abandoned.
By the time I had skied for a dozen hours the sun had
completed half a circuit around the sky, moving from a place
away to my right, across the space in front of me, to a position
on my left. In my last hour it broke through the weather as
a silver flame. The pale disc I'd seen occasionally through a
veil of cloud was now totally transmuted into a cruciform
flare as dense as white-hot steel. A leaden sky above a bleak
landscape of ashen snow should have felt sombre but the silver
light of the sun gave Antarctica a seasonal feel. Something of