Sundogs and Haloes - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 163

wherever they please but an image of their grazing areas from
the air reveals well-trodden paths, radiating in erratic lines
from a common spot, proving that the movement is actually
very repetitive and limited. If all the tracks made by travel
in Antarctica over the years were visible, I imagine an aerial
image would resemble those pictures of fields with systematic
pathways radiating from the Pole. It is rare that any expedition
veers too far from these known but unseen trails. There are
still immense tracts of space between them that have never
known human footfall. The map I carried - part of the only
useful series of charts available for Antarctica - still featured
large areas annotated with comments like 'group of low peaks
reported 1965'. I can only assume that no one has been back
since to check.
I think it is perhaps Antarctica's lack of human history that
forms the essence of its magnetism, the reason why so many
are irresistibly drawn to it. In the South, we are presented
forcefully with the reality of our frailty and the certainty
of our irrelevance to the natural forces working around us.
Antarctica shrugs us off without effort. The continent makes
me feel vulnerable, both as an individual and as a species. Like
views of Earth from space, a view of the Antarctic plateau
brings man dramatically into contact with his own limitations.
It bludgeons him over the head with the knowledge that
nature on our own planet, never mind in the solar system
and universe beyond, is far greater, far larger, far older and
more limitless than we will ever be. On the plateau we are
still no more than precarious visitors. Perhaps that is why this
continent more than any other fascinates us, terrifies us, brings
us to new understanding and demands deferential respect. To
travel through Antarctica is to glimpse existence before man.