Paying Attention - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 27

ground but which were now almost lost in the flattened view
from the air. Eventually, I recognised the broad, rounded
hump of Patriot Hills sitting slightly apart from the rest of the
mountain range and used it as a reference to guide my gaze
and pick out Three Sails, a row of snow-smothered nunataks
(the tips of mountains that have been otherwise submerged
by ice) which resembled evenly spaced pimples. As I looked
down at the lumpy shadows they cast I reflected that if all
went well I would be skiing past those same outcrops in
some two months' time. By that stage I would be covering the
very last miles of my journey, the trio of distinctive peaklets
acting as a signpost to direct me to the nearby coast. I tried
to imagine what it would feel like to be that future version
of myself and what would be going through my mind after
weeks alone, knowing that a thousand miles lay behind me.
Three Sails gradually glided out of view beyond the scope
of my scratched and distorted porthole in the side of the
plane and I was left with a blinding glare of white. Pulling my
sunglasses down over my eyes I still had to squint to pick out
surface texture on the endless plain below. It wasn't smooth but
covered in a web of corrugations, reminding me of the intricate
formations of an organism magnified under a microscope. At
first the grain of the ground looked to be totally random but
then I began to detect a regularity in its pattern, as if a single
motif was being repeated over and over. Lines and scores,
smooth patches and regular parallels. From the air it looked as
harmless as the crinkles on a ruffled shirt but I wondered how
different the perspective from the ground would be.
The plane flew on and on over mile after mile of the
same pleated expanse. There was no end to its span and no
variation in its character. It seemed impossible that I could