Paying Attention - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 33

immense platform of floating ice that stretched northward
from the feet of the Transantarctic Mountains to open water
somewhere way beyond the horizon.
Below, I could still see the dark thread of the traverse route
forging across the snow as level as a ruled line and knew that
it continued all the way to McMurdo, the American base some
1,000 kilometres away on the other side of the Ross Ice Shelf.
Either side of the tracks I could see the tell-tale dark spokes
of crevassing, visible beneath the snow like blue veins under a
cadaverous skin. In places the crevasses clustered together in a
dense plexus and at times the tracks appeared to be so close as
to kiss the outlying fissures as it skimmed by.
We descended over the Ross Ice Shelf, circling the tracks to
take a closer look. The convoy had left a series of deep parallel
impressions in the snow perhaps as much as ten metres wide in
places and it presented the safest option for a crevasse-free landing.
The plane, fitted with skis under its wheels, used the imprints as a
rough runway and rumbled to an abrupt halt on the ice.
I had already been warned that the pilots would only be
shutting down one engine and that they would be leaving as
soon as possible. They didn't want to risk getting stuck on the
ground so far from home. The door next to my seat opened
and the head of one pilot appeared.
'Did you see the crevasses?' he shouted over the noise of the
remaining engine.
I nodded emphatically, my eyes wide in a caricature of
the alarm I had felt as we had flown over them. The pilot
disappeared and the co-pilot replaced him in the doorway,
crawling into the back to help me with my sledges.
'Did you see those crevasses?' he asked as we passed
each other.