We travel through a land utterly devoid of life, an ancient world so cold and dry that the only living creatures in it are a tiny insect living on a mountain peak and the bacteria and algae it feeds on. At the edge of the continent, where the ice meets the sea, life abounds. But here on the frigid windswept plains of the Antarctic plateau, nothing can survive. For Ray, Richard and myself, “we are the only pulsating creatures in a dead world of ice,” in the words of explorer Frederick Albert Cook.
A feeling of insignificance is hard to abate when you realize the scale of this landscape. Seemingly endless expanses of ice stretch in every direction and much of it is an unfathomable three kilometres thick. In this ancient landscape, you need to drill down only a short distance to reach ice from the time of the pharaohs.
We have been on the ice for more than three weeks now. With faces wrapped tight under hat and mask, we talk little while we travel. The hours pass with thoughts wandering from the past to the present, one minute thinking about childhood and the next dwelling on a blister on your foot.
Antarctica has in many ways washed our senses clean. There are no odours in this environment other than the smell of ourselves (surprisingly acceptable, considering we have not changed clothes in a month) and sound is limited to the growl of the wind and the squeak of snow underfoot. On those rare moments when the wind subsides, one is enveloped in an absolute silence that is soon consumed by the sound of your own heart. The colours of the Antarctic world are limited to the white of the terrain and the limitless blue of the sky. When clouds creep in over the horizon, it's as if an eyelid is closing tight over the landscape. Moving forward into a blinding world of white with no perception of physical space, we probe with our ski poles, trying to sense what is in front of us. The frozen waves of sastrugi that rake the surface make us lurch and stumble like an over-indulgent partygoer struggling home after a night out.
It is a slow and frustrating process and very dangerous when passing through crevasses.
The clothes that fit us at the start of the expedition hang limply from us now. Ray estimates he has loss more than 20 pounds and the job is still not done.
We are still maintaining a record pace, but exhaustion is setting in. It is the final push to the South Pole and hopefully by some time next week we will reach our goal.
Follow the team's progress at southpolequest.com
