LOO-JW - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 62

a blacksmith shaping steel. Occasionally a particularly violent
gust would make me swear out loud in fright and I'd sit up
looking everywhere at once, convinced that at any moment the
tent would come apart. I wore everything but my jacket which
I tucked securely underneath me in readiness for a sudden
exposure to the elements.
Sleep was impossible. Even if I had been able to calm my
frenzied mind, the noise and vibrations would have kept me
awake. Every few hours I left the warmth of my sleeping bag,
pulled on face mask, goggles, boots and jacket, zipping the
jacket right up to my chin so that the fur trim of my hood
formed a protective cocoon around my face, and pushed
myself out of the tent into the maelstrom. Each time the
force of the wind would take me by surprise and I'd stagger
unsteadily. Occasionally I didn't bother standing up at all and
shuffled around on my hands and knees, adding more snow to
the heaps around the tent to replace any that had been blown
away, tightening guy ropes and checking that the anchors I'd
buried in the ground were still secure. The sun was high in
the sky above the glacier on the southern reaches of its slow
rotation, undaunted and undimmed by the weather below.
Even in my desperate scrabbling in the snow and the terrifying
fury of the winds, I couldn't resist pausing to look around me
at the smoky squalls drifting gracefully beneath sun-kissed
peaks. It seemed strange to be on the brink of calamity in such
cheerful sunshine.
Back in the tent, I pulled my satellite phone out of my jacket
pocket and discovered that in the struggle to pitch my tent I had
snapped the aerial that extended from the top of the handset.
The upper half of the receiver hung limply at an angle. The
wires holding it together, normally hidden, were now clearly