Bald-Headed Men - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 155

to detect any slight patch of imperfection in the greyish white
ground ahead to aim for. As the visibility steadily worsened,
the distance between the markers got shorter until I was
moving between patches of shade no more than a few metres
apart. Halfway through the day, peering into the murk for my
next marker, I noticed a pale blue eye peering at me from the
blankness. Then, as if they were materialising out of nothing,
I could see them everywhere, all around me: the centres of
sastrugi, identical in form to the barrel of a wave. What scared
me was the size of them. When I had come across such eyes
before, they had been the size of a fist but those ahead of me
now were larger than shopping trolleys. To create eyes this big
I knew the sastrugi around them had to be huge but I couldn't
see the snow formations themselves, just the blue shadows
of the spaces created beneath and within them as the waves
of hard-packed, wind-sculpted snow curled over themselves
like the white-horses of the sea. I skied forward a few paces
and noticed a huge blue void a few feet to my left. It was big
enough to fall into and deep enough that if I did fall I could
easily sprain, strain or break something. Distracted by the void
I didn't immediately notice the open pit directly in my path
ahead until my ski-tips were already over hanging the lip of the
huge powder-blue hole.
I stopped to look around me with new anxiety. The
surrounding snow seemed full of fresh menace. Awkwardly I
manoeuvred my skis to the left of the blue space, waddling like
a duck to haul my sledges over the uneven ground. As I worked
my way around the rim of the dimly lit cavity I could make out
thick tongues of hard-packed snow overhanging the hollow
space. Each tongue was the size of a dolphin. I struggled to
imagine how big these sastrugi must be given the disruption