Paying Attention - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 30

only inverted, the snow sagging slightly into the fissures it
covered like a sheet of silk.
It was beautiful but terrifying; the very essence of sublime.
I couldn't help but imagine the horror of trying to pick a
route through such a minefield. It was impossible to tell from
the air how big the fissures were but as the shadow of the
plane flittered across their contours it regularly disappeared
completely into the blackness of gaping holes where the snow
had fallen through to leave yawing voids. In a second, the
reverberations in the pit of my stomach had solidified into a
leaden mass. I felt like I'd been winded and the sensation made
me cough. I tore my eyes from the window and stared hard
at my feet as I fought the rising panic. Was this the top of the
Leverett Glacier? Would I have to ski across this confusion
of crevasses? Was this what I had condemned myself to? The
mass in my stomach became so heavy that its gravity seemed
to pin me to the spot, like the nauseating sensation of looping
the loop on a roller coaster.
My brain's first instinct was to search for an escape. It
would be perfectly justifiable, I reasoned with myself, to
return to Union Glacier and explain that after seeing what
I would be facing I'd realised I wasn't up to it. I'd rather
accept what others might see as the humiliation of bailing
out than end up dead. I recalled stories I'd been told of
people who had prematurely ended expeditions by citing
dubious injury or tenuous logistical complications as an
excuse to go home and I felt a sudden flood of sympathy. In
that Damascene moment any sense of derision was replaced
with total understanding.
As the flood of panic subsided, I remembered the thrill of
freedom I had anticipated not a few hours before as the plane