Sundogs and Haloes - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 164

Antarctica is elemental and that, I think, forms the core of its
addictive attraction.
As I stood looking at my view of a thousand kilometres I
wished, not for the first time, that I could magically teleport
my Dad from home in England to stand beside me so that we
could share this moment. I so dearly wish he could experience
for himself - even if only for a moment - the Antarctica I have
been allowed to see. I am certain he would be filled with the
same deep sense of exhilaration. It feels strange that those
closest to me are likely never to encounter the place that has
absorbed so much of my life.
I remembered that during my first expedition to the South
Pole I had etched the letters '4 Mum + Dad' in the hard packed
snow of the eighty-ninth degree with a fat gloved finger and
taken a photograph of the crude phrase in the foreground
of an empty Antarctic horizon: white crystalline snow, solid
indigo-blue sky. I had meant to give them the image in a frame
- my gift of a small fragment of place and time in Antarctica
dedicated exclusively to them - but it occurred to me now that
I had never got around to it. The words I had etched would be
long gone but I like to believe that the sentiment they expressed
is still there somewhere, locked in the ice.
Like a perfect reflection in calm water that is destroyed by
the slightest of disturbances, my sense of an infinite horizon
was lost as soon as I moved towards it. It had been a number of
days since I had battled through the last of the tortuous ground
and giant sastrugi of the eighty-seventh degree. The character
of the landscape around me had stealthily transformed day
by day. Gone was the brutal flatness of the higher latitudes
surrounding the Pole, where the unrelenting horizontal of
the terrain had seemed to compress sightlines into stern