Bald-Headed Men - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 157

my nose, making it twitch like a rabbit. Up ahead the light had
changed. There was a dull yellow smudge on the grey sky like
a nicotine stain. It was the sun, burning free of its concealment
behind the cloud. My heart lurched in gratitude, my cheeks
aching with a sudden, spontaneous grin. As I watched, the
sky broke open and smoky beams of sunlight fell earthwards
through translucent air filled with ice-mist and vapour. I sniffed
back tears of relief, treating myself to a wipe of my running
nose along the back of my mitt.
'Thank you, thank you, thank you,' I whispered aloud, the
hiss of breath loud in my ears.
But as the sunlight lit the landscape my eyes grew wide in
astonishment. Revealing itself as steadily from the gloom as
a developing photograph was a black-and-white scene of
devastation, a tortured terrain of buckled ground. The tallest
sastrugi I had ever seen rose into ridges and towers like
battlements. Squared blocks of hardened snow and sculpted
ice rested on each other like the altars of giants and snow
streamed between them, ushered by the wind, so that the
ground seethed in restless movement. It felt like I had stumbled
across the ruins of a great city from a past apocalypse. I felt
dwarfed and subdued by the magnitude of it.
This must be the rough ground Cas and Jonesy talked about,
I thought to myself. Rough ground was an understatement; I
had never seen anything like it. The large spaces I had seen as
deep blue pools in the dull flattened white of the bad visibility
made sense now - they were all that was visible of the voids and
dells between these icy monoliths. This is why the going had
been so difficult. Scanning the tumultuous scene I despaired
at finding a route through the debris, there didn't seem to be
room to squeeze between one towering obstacle and the next