Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
191
During one three-day period, the wind speed rose to forty knots around
camp, and we were forced to hunker in our tents, enveloped in blowing snow. It is
during storms like these that I have learned to love the Scott tents. When planted
properly, these four-sided pyramids will bear the fiercest gale, their double
walls flapping loudly as they keep out the force of the wind. During this storm,
tumultuous clouds ripped through the scene, opening periodically to reveal the
escarpment lip beyond the adjacent ridge (Fig. S.12).
A storm such as this can move in quickly, so we always have to be cautious if
working far from camp, and watch that the weather doesn't turn. To be caught
out can truly be a matter of life and death. But back at camp with the warmth
of the cookstove at hand we can feel secure and even cozy. Then it is good to go
out into the blast, not to confront the wind but to feel its pressure, to lean the
body into it, to find the angle of balance, to sense the vagaries in the flow, to feel
the cold, to listen to the voices wheezing and whistling around every obstacle in
camp—tents, boxes, bamboo poles.
Out beyond the noise of camp, we hear only the soft shoosh of blowing
snow streaming through the sastrugi. We look up to a blue sky and down into the
miasma of snow and wind at ground level, opaque beyond one hundred yards.
We are walking at the dynamic interface of atmosphere and solid earth; wind
pants flap, and we squint with one eye peering down the tunnel of the hood,
balancing between the cross gust and the pitch of our strides. noses drip and
fingers begin to ache from the cold. The wind is right there with us: we slip on
through its stream.
Where the ice began to spill oV the plateau, broad swaths of crevasses foreshortened
to narrow bands were glistening in gray and white, like the scales on schools of so many
fish. Just at the horizon the empty blue sky converted to white, slightly less brilliant than
the ice sheet beneath. About five miles directly south of Mount Weaver was a faceted
peak, symmetrical and sharp-topped, covered to the summit on its northwest face by a
graceful drift (Fig. 6.10). Another ten miles south of that, the headreaches of Scott Gla-
cier merged with the plateau between a low ridge mainly covered in ice and a more formi-
dable edifice of rock standing like a black wharf in the sea of white (Fig. 6.11).
All the southern continents have a land's-end—that last, narrow cape before the
Southern Ocean, for land dwellers a place where souls depart this earthly realm and sea-
farers the gateway to beyond. Mount Howe is the land's-end of Earth, interior to Ant-
arctica, the last promontory from which one can gaze south across the frozen ocean, out
toward the still turning beyond the arced horizon. It creates the first turbulence in a flux
of air begun at the outer edge of the troposphere. Surely this is a place of spirits—that is,
if any inhabit this frozen region at all (Fig. 6.12).
For 360° the Earth radiated from the summit of Mount Weaver. The climbers were
