Sundogs and Haloes - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 161

my blood stream - it was a sense of intimidation. The sudden
visualisation of just how far I still had to go was frightening.
The wind blew against my back and scraped along the side of
my hood, filling my ears with its constant fricative. Low ridges
of sastrugi twisted away from me like the braided streams of
an intricate river delta, channelling the drifting snow which
was sent tumbling northwards by the wind at a speed I envied.
Each particle span gracefully over the hardened surface, a
surface I knew would feel as cold and firm to the touch as
wet stone. With distance, the long interlacing ridge-lines of the
sastrugi appeared to shorten and form a tighter weave until
the alternating light and dark of closely packed ridge and
trough beneath the horizon resembled the minute overlapping
scales of a silver fish. Further away still, the pattern changed
again, becoming more foliose, like the minute flaky gradations
of lichen. Nothing was white or blue, everything had a shade
to it: mauve, celadon, blush, amber, peach. Even the sallow
sky, striped with half-hearted washes of cloud, glimmered with
flecks of colour like the skin of a freshwater pearl. The sun
hid itself behind an outcrop of dim, dense cloud, setting the
edges alight with magnesium fire. As I took it all in, gentle
but insistent fingers of cold probed my layers of clothing, their
tingling touch filtering inwards as if each material layer I wore
was steadily dissolved by degrees into nothing more protective
than a loose webbing of fibres. I felt the cold coming but still I
stood motionless, letting the imprint of the view sink into me
as surely as the chill.
It's impossible to witness such a landscape and not be struck
by just how vast and how empty the southern continent
truly is. In England every stone, every clump of soil, has been
touched by repeated human hands through endless ages. The