Forty-Six - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 75

to let myself get despondent but the terrain, the loneliness, the
unexpected delays, the unyielding weather and the sheer effort
of each day took its toll. Every night as I lay in my sleeping bag
waiting for sleep I would listen to the menacing echo of the air's
restlessness, magnified by the crack and rumble of tent fabric.
I imagined each surge that blasted my shelter to be a breaker
in a vast ocean. The wind of the South, like the waves of the
ocean, gain their power over a fetch of a thousand miles and in
my mind's eye the tent became a small boat tossed in the swell,
the agitated material around me transformed into the clatter
of badly trimmed sails and the dry snow being blown against
my tent sounding uncannily like the spray of the sea. I lingered
on the thought that my presence was as inconsequential to the
wind of Antarctica as flotsam to the waves of the Atlantic.
I had prayed for a calm day but the first thing I heard when I
woke was the continued thunder of wind and the brittle report
of the tent convulsing around me. Still in my sleeping bag I
unzipped a chink in the tent door and looked out into solid
white. As I peered outward looking for any hint of a horizon,
puffs of drifting snow exploded through my tiny peephole
spraying the hood of my sleeping bag with ice crystals that
promptly melted into tiny pools. I closed the gap and lay
back into the warmth of my down bag. Staring upwards at
the chequered weave of the tent a few feet above my face, my
mind digested the fact that the day ahead would be as hard
as the day that had just passed. I was filled with a deadening
conviction; I couldn't go on.
Antarctica was more than I could manage on my own. I could
not get out of the tent and confront the remorseless weather that
waited for me. I could not spend another day inching forward