I went to Antarctica with SANAP for the period Dec 1998 to Feb 1999. The trip was 100 days, and I was on the ice with my mate, pretty much just the 2 of us and our skidoos and supplies, for 59 days. It's in my (unpublished) book, what follows is fiction, but a lot of the experience and emotions are fact. The trip was a gift, given to me by my mate Peb, and it was something inconceivable and astonishing::

These then, were the colours of the South : blue, black, white. And these were the secrets of the South :  sound and light, silence and light. And the source of the colours were these : the blue manufactured from a sky free of errant electrons, a sky wide with oxygen and trace gases only, a sky big enough to tower above them like a falling cathedral, and dense enough to crush them with living gas. The white from the sun, impotent eye in an endless blue, crystalline with fury, trying to blast the arrogant land below it but succeeding only to ignite the snow and ice, a permanent summer conflagration, a glare from the mouth of a magnifying glass. The white from the sea of frozen water, white snow, white ice, white penumbra about the sun. White arcs refracting off a single still crystal; screams of white ricocheting off a plain of white; mountains of white scraping the blue-white sky. And black : the highest peaks only, all other land submerged under a gigantic crush of. White. Black crags breaking loose from their terrible bonds to lie groaning above the surface. Cliffs, scarps, dikes, buttresses, citadels, slick-black and slippy with the day’s run-off.

The coldest land, the highest land, the dryest land, the cleanest land, the quietest land. The most angry land.

Like rain on the moon, it shouldn’t have been there, it defied all sense. But there it was.

And the source of the secrets were : the light from the white sun and the white freeze. A laser-show, a fireworks display drained of colour, catherine-wheels and rockets and screech-owls and sparklers, tom-thumbs and flower-gardens, all one colour only. A red skidoo – an abomination, even the word red in his diary looked wrong. The sun was an elliptic in the sky, an oval prescribed by the angle of the earth, and the season. A sun wheeling relentlessly overhead while the ground received the pummelling of photons effortlessly, bouncing them back and off itself again, again, again, a padded cell of white, with white fireworks in it, exploding forever. The oval slipping back over their heads over time, maintaining its shape, but changing its centre, so that the wheel dipped closer and closer to the edge of the white.

In late February, a new colour, a shock after the bleach, blessed relief from the blackbluewhite. Gold crept in, a new firecracker, the sun treacling through a much longer basin of air, slowing the light until it stopped and black, white and blue became united. The midas touch of the sun in late summer. A plain forever long, by the breadth of the world, a dragon curling on its tail at the bottom of nowhere, all gold, its scales its breath and the fire from its jaws, gold.

And the unexpected secret : the sound of the silence. When no wind blew there was not a sound – a boot scraping a rock was a fusillade of cannon-fire, an engine was all sound that had ever been made, ever. There was no way to circumnavigate that silence, no words were built by the further-north race to encompass that quality. No sound no sound no sound no sound no sound no sound, he wrote in his diary, filling a page, and the pen in that silence was a shout wide enough to drag the sky down.

The South. It had five dimensions, and they were blue, black, white, sound and light. Breadth, length, width and time were for more subtle places, where distances and days made some kind of sense. It was the most godforsaken, angry, beautiful place he had ever seen. Going South was to be fucked by the most erotic, exotic goddess in the pantheon, and while she fucked you she ate you from the head down. And yet, and yet, she could be more subtle than anywhere else. Her extremities exposed her softness with more definition. In the midst of a storm, a fury of sound and white, Day saw how crystals were growing inexorably on the tent’s guy-ropes. Unimaginably fragile, and somehow impervious to the maelstrom-war going on around them, they grew like edelweiss. Snow-flowers. And when the gold came, then even the rock was subdued. Black no more, for two weeks in a year the hardiest and gruffest and most belligerent cliff-faces relaxed and softened their features to receive the balm. A two-week vacation from their endless fight to stay upright in a world constructed solely of anger. Blue snow caves, quiet and cosy outside the howl of the wind, a tiny pool of rock-melt glittering with diamonds, the sight of a snow-petrel riding the slow rollers of air. She could be subtle too.

She was Shiva, for Day thereafter. The great destroyer and the great creator. She was a woman, of that he had no doubt, and it was hard to question his feeling of her sentience. A long slow mind firing synapses of ice across neuron crevasses, thinking, slowly, slowly.

Antarctica. The coldest land, the highest land, the dryest land, the cleanest land, the quietest land. The most angry land. For a boy who saw ice as the end of life, the beginning of pain, it was a place to be feared. But what he learned there, as he was put together again under the most extreme of conditions, was that no knife cuts in one way only. The source of all that had buffeted him all his life, that had tried to sway him from equanimity and a path of adaptation, a survivor’s path, that source provided the cruel cold, the extremity that allowed him to heal.

When he was young, a drunk driver had smashed his bones for him. The pain that started in him then he associated with cold, and when they were taken from him, his father, his grandmother, his friends and his lover, he saw the ice coming each time. The great cracking and snarling and baying and smashing of the glaciers as they came to sweep him away. When he went south, he expected his end. He was going to where all pain came from, the antithesis of life and laughter, and at some level, he believed he was going there to die. He was going to join Aidan and Mallory Moresley, and Leonora and Germ and Boreana in the great stillness at the end of the world, his molecules to stop moving, his breath to turn to snow.

He should not have been surprised, a man who could adapt to just about anything, when, paradoxically, the great white cold came and instead of stilling him, ending him, stopping the turning of his essential particles – instead of that end, the source of all ice instead shored up his pain, restored him, and eased him, and little by little pieced him together again.

The first warmth of healing in the tundra of his desert heart came on the ship, in a storm close to Bouvet Island. The ice-crusher brought them there, the Agulhas, its 120,000 tonnes trained to endure storm and sea, and even to slide up pack-ice, then its flat bottom to crush the pack mercilessly, snapping and cracking a way through. They had sat on the heli-pad all day, sheltered from the gusts coalescing off the sea. Birds dived and wheeled in the wake, birds Damon Ryan had never seen before, the pelagics, the sea-farers, the wind-cruisers. They saw petrels and prions, skuas and shearwaters, and the kings of them all, the great albatrosses sliding in off the wind, wandering the sea to find them there and never needing to flap their wings. People came and went, diesel mechanics, geos, biologists, physicists and doctors, and not for the first time, he thought of Lucian’s thought. What the hell am I doing here? How had he ended here, on this metal ship ploughing south? What curves had his life followed to bring him to this pass? He did not know, he just enjoyed the sensation of the sun on the deck and the pitch and roll and the scent of the clean sea.

Later that day, their first iceberg. An old one, melted over as much as thousands of years, so that only the deep dark blue of the crystal core remained, the less dense ice having melted off into the sea. It was small, one-fifth the side of the boat, but its deep azure spoke to Damon of the colours to come. Even off its shores, the colours of Antarctica bled their hues into the Southern Ocean.

As the fought south, the sight of the sea would hold endless fascination for Damon. No two icebergs were even remotely similar. They varied from the size of small sheds, with a lone leopard seal sunning itself in silence, to great chunks of the ice-shelf itself, that had cracked off the frozen continent to circle endlessly in the currents. Some of these could be the size of mountains, or bigger, the size of the Cape Peninsula. If one got caught in a northern flow, it might last for years, melting only gradually in warmer waters, and it was even possible for them to reach the African Coast, withered now and small, but their cores intact. He had heard of an iceberg being sighted in the Benguela current off the West Coast, the barren desert on the west of his country, hot and dry, but there – in the cold sea, the white-blue of a piece of the south.

No journey to the deck was without awe, as the sea froze over, the ship could no longer churn south, it would have to pick its way through a vast billiard-table sea of ice chunks, and the sea itself was no longer pure water, but poised on the edge of frozen, a slush of thick water. Until even the film of the surface froze entirely, a pancake surface forming, and the ship cutting its way over the thin surface, exposing liquid only where it had travelled, the whole sea-scape frozen over with vast wedges and V’s and humpbacks of ice-bergs studding the surface, and in all the frozen solidity, no land at all. In such conditions, no waves could form, no wind could raise a tremor from the ironing-board surface, and at times the wind died, and then Day heard the first of the silence, only the diesel throbbing of the engines creating the sound of life in the vast soundlessness.

But that came later, as they neared the shelf. Nearer Bouvet, the sea still reigned, not having relinquished its power to another medium. There were icebergs too, more and more, but the sea battered and bashed them relentlessly, pluming white off the impassive sides of ice, and beaches of white suffering endless breakers against them. And the sea rose and rose. As they neared the basalt barren-ness of Bouvet, the most isolated island on earth, sixteen hundred kilometres from the nearest land, the seas rose. Black rock, stained mustard in places by oxidation and standing fast under the brute weight of a 600 metre cap of ice. Huge seracs overhanging the scoured dark cliffs, crevasses pitting the ice walls and chunks snapping off from their own white, falling in slow-time to blast geysers off the ocean, the wind whipping the spume away and into the faces of the onlookers and the ship that had no business being there.

Damon watched the chopper pilots fight the bitter wind, their Angolan training keeping their hands steady on the throttle, and the finest pieces of flying he would ever see were performed there. The Oryxes transporting a biological team and their equipment onto the benighted island, and then the empty choppers returning to land on the helipad as the deck swayed and pitched hideously, they steadied themselves above it, watching and waiting, the howling rotors only a metre from the superstructure of the Agulhas, and then, from high the choppers dropped, hitting their wheels on the desk, just as it was horizontal between rolls, and the team running out to secure it there before the roll had played itself out completely.

It was wild land, and wild men doing hard work. When Jean Bouvet de Lozier saw the island for the first time, looming out of mist in 1768, he was unsure whether it was  a cape, an island, or an extension of an uncharted continent. For twelve days he fought just to keep his vessel in sight of the outcrop; landfall was out of the question. On the thirteenth day, a storm came up and simply drove them away. One hundred and fifty nine more years it took before man set foot there, such was the difficulty of Antarctic exploration.

When they left that place to head south once more, always south, then Day saw what they were up against.

The wind hit sixty knots and they were no longer sailing a sea, rather traversing a mountainous wilderness, with swells towing above them and the wind always howling. That night in the mess, the ship rolled to 45 degrees, and not even the clamped equipment could handle that, plates, stoves, chairs, and pots went flying, all in one direction to burst against the walls, scattering soup and steak, and the detritus rolled about the floor as the rolls continued, crockery and gravy and knives and forks sliding and churning around in a cacophony of disarray. Day saw the aftermath, and it looked as if giants had had a food-fight in there.

His heart was a desert though, so he climbed the three levels of decking, up to the bridge and the navigation room, and there he opened the door to the upper deck and went outside. Into the wind. No land interrupts the continuous belt of water that girdles the oceans of the south, waves and wind build without censure into madness. A 5 metre swell is common; the wind gales at an average year round of seventy kilometres per hour. In time of storms, several times per month, fifteen metre swells arise, sculpted by one-hundred and eighty kilometre per hour winds. This was what D Ryan went out into. His breath had to be cupped, because the wind would steal it from him, or push it back down him too fast, and the cables holding the life-rafts screamed their wind-song, like electric carving knives. He climbed the ladder to the funnel level, feeling a blast of warmth from the exhaust, to be immediately pummelled away by the bitter wind. And he climbed again, one last ladder to the top of the ship, and Rick would have stopped him if he had known – as he climbed, the rolling made him feel like the ship was careening over him, his back would reach the sea, even from this height, and then the metal of the structure would slap him into that bitter cold, breaking him in two, before the freeze could kill him. Then the roll went the other way, and his stomach told him that he was going to fly forward now, off the top of the ladder, flicked into the ocean that would tolerate the warmth of his life for not much more than sixty seconds.

But he held on and staggered across the deck, pelting with rain, between the cables and dishes of the radar and radios. That was the most dangerous part; he had to time the rolls, like the chopper pilots had to, to cross the deck when it was relatively level, but the pitch changed as he ran, and his boots were threatening to lose their grip, and he fell heavily against one guard rail, and he felt like that was where it could have ended. He could have just flipped over that rail, into the mountainous madness below, and he would have succumbed to his enemy, the cold, the ice, so quickly, that it would have been a merciful death.

And that was when something in him changed. He held on, his gloves gripping the saving rail so tightly, not even the wind or the roll could pry him off, and he knew he wanted to go on living. That is the point in which Damon Ryan felt some small warmth ignite in his heart, and he knew he wanted his life.

His mother Amy, in tears, had made him swear to survive, to get his strength back, to find his breath as she had when Aidan was frozen from her. He had nodded dumbly at her, and she was not sure that he meant it, but Amy, now, would have smiled and laughed at the sudden flick of a spark being born in her son’s dead chest.

He saw such chaos about him, such intolerance for life, such extremities of wind and blackness and spray and rain and waves, none of it accepting, none of it tolerating a single breath, in fact violently opposed to that breath, wanting to suck it from him, blast it out of him for good. he saw these things, and because of them, a breath became a thing of value again, something to take, simply because so many things were against him taking it. The forces arrayed against life, here in this dark place, made him see life, and his life as something of worth again.

The ice, the cold would win, he knew, it was its nature to win, ultimately against everything. In ten trillion years, even the universe would die, because all heat would have dissipated out of it and only the final cold would be left, the final nothing. The cold would win, but that put a higher value on warmth, on life. He breathed in, carefully, and nurtured the small flame in his chest, and watched the world of fury before him, and came at last, if not to forgive the ice that fought him, then to respect it for what it was, and to be determined to be a valiant opponent to it, while there was breath in him to oppose.

The first thawing of Damon Ryan took place in a storm in the Southern Ocean, on a hardy metal ship that bore them all to the place that would that would thaw him completely. His experience of Antarctica was to be a journey, a journey of miles, and a journey milestoned by the cautious re-emergence of his soul.

The sea froze, and fell, defeated at last by the pack, and the boat slowed and gingerly picked its way through the danger. After eighteen days at sea, it could go south no more. The pack was too thick for it to crush. Thick enough to support Caterpillars, even though four kilometres of ocean still lay below them. Full fathoms five.

The geo team boarded the choppers, they needed the longest window on the summer, because they would be exposed to it, and so they would fly to SANAE immediately. The cargo would follow, by Caterpillar and chopper, and then the Agulhas would depart for Tristan da Cunha, Marion, Gough. They would be alone in the great south. The south that they saw from the chopper windows as they droned inland, the pack ice a smear of endless white below them, and then the giant walls of the shelf, the edge of the titanic river of ice that flowed constantly off the continent. Day would later stand on a deck, after the season, guiding containers into place, containers suspended by the Oryx choppers, while the shelf stood by to starboard soaring above the ship, the gigantic ramp sliced into it by the Cats suspended now, its mouth high above the deck of the ship; as chunks broke off the shelf during the summer, so the mouth of the ramp became higher and higher. Next season, there would be no ramp. It was a classic of Antarctica, the continent that never changed, but never, ever remained static. The shelf was always there, but its edges were being eroded constantly to be replaced by the never-ceasing river of ice.

From the air, it looked like the Great Wall of China.

Then at last, at long last, they were over land, for the first time in weeks. The chopper shadow chased them, the only black on the surface, and it rushed up towards them over rises they could not discern in the low contrast, and disappeared entirely as they flew over great shear-cracks, crevasses big enough to devour five Agulhases. Their shadow followed them, and then it was not the only black, as nunataks began to make their appearance – the highest peaks of the submerged topography rearing out of the ice as exposed crags. The wind blasted these outcrops so hard and so well, that around them no snow would live. The wind scoops were kept forever free of spindrift, only hard blue ice and the faint smudge of crevasses were apparent in their lee. Two hundred kilometres they flew, and the mountains appeared, Barius and Passat, Robertskollen, the Ahlmanryggen and there – the Borga in the distance, where their skidoos would take them.

On Vesles, a wide, high nunatak, the SANAP base had been erected. Vast containers hoisted up on scaffolding, they hung in the air, welded on girders into the rock of the mountain-top. Wind would never cease trying to remove the base, but no snow could build up against it, because it hung in the air. Older bases, built on ice, had gradually sunk into the snow, eventually becoming subterranean, and ultimately crushed by the unyielding press of the deeper ice. They flew in, past the Cats, the skidoos, the fuel bladders, and touched down on the heli-pad, their first step onto the continent proper.

The story of the ice was the story of brave men. Cook, in the Resolution and Adventure, circumnavigating a continent in the greatest sea-voyage ever made, without once glimpsing the sight of the continent itself. Scott, heroic, but doomed from the start against the better logistics of Amundsen. Fiennes and Stroud, what they had endured was more than humans should have been able to take. But there were other stories too, that astonished Damon even more. The story of Shackleton’s Endurance, the ship that Antarctica caught and crushed. They walked away from it, dragging the lifeboats with them as far as they could, and then pitched camp to wait the melting of the pack-ice. As it came apart beneath them, they set sail, after horrendous discomfort and privation making landfall on the uninhabited Elephant Island. They stood there, on solid ground, for the first time in 485 days, but it was far from over. In a 22-foot open whaleboat, Shackleton took five volunteers to try to summon help from the whaling station at South Georgia Island, 1200km away, in one of the most hazardous journeys ever attempted in the history of sea-faring. There had never been a story like that, Day was sure. He remembered the storm off Bouvet, and then imagined a lifeboat in such weather, with clothing wet and torn, food scarce, the boat on the verge of sinking, constantly being threatened by breaking apart, seventeen days at sea. And when they had made land, they still had to walk on broken feet over an island that had never been crossed, climbing almost 2000 metres with no equipment. They prevailed, arriving at the whaling station, and returning to rescue the remaining crew at Elephant Island. Not one life was lost, every man came alive off the ice.

And Stich Hallgren, whose Caterpillar had plunged into four miles of ocean when the ice-shelf cracked off, taking them with it. Only he had made it out of the sinking machine, finding himself in a sea close to –1.8 degrees centigrade and scattered with icebergs. He hauled himself up a ‘berg, stripped down, and set about keeping himself alive for thirteen hours, naked and wet and exposed, until he was rescued.

There was no end to stories such as these, in a continent which kept its privacy intact until 1820. No man had ever seen it before that day. The history of the place, the astounding chapters in the book of its discovery, made Damon Ryan feel is if somehow, just by stepping onto to cold steel grid of the heli-pad at one of the bases, made him feel as if he was privileged too.

They left on Christmas day, five geologists and two assistants. They left on skidoos to no fanfare, everyone at the base was so busy with their tasks, pumping diesel, repairing engines, taking readings, making radio schedules. That night, the base would have a Christmas dinner. The geos would camp near Istind, ice-tooth, that night still day, no night would come now, not for forty days, and they would eat irradiated bobotie. The sound of the skidoo engines had accompanied them all day, breaking the silence that was all pervasive. When his hands began to freeze, Day held them over the exhaust of the engine, and flicked the blood back into his painful extremities. Pieter, the grizzled seventh man, had warned him about it. It would, Piet said, feel as if he was hammering on his fingers with a mallet, as they warmed up and came to life again. Piet was right. All day they rode south, still  south, past the nunataks that greeted them on the way, Istind, Grunehogna, where the old advanced base had been, and where they would shelter from a blizzard on the way back. Through the Armallsryggen they rode, and Damon had never felt more alive. He forgot the ice of an evening of bloodshed in the rain, when his throat was shot out with his heart. Instead he saw ice now, just as ice, its pure stark beauty being only ever honest with them as the sailed over it. Behind, their tracks left the only marks of humans in the entire wide landscape. They went to Moteplassen the next day, meeting place of valleys, and it was an astonishingly beautiful camp. He climbed Stridbukken with Dave and Gerhardt. While they talked geology, Damon lay with his back to a boulder, right at the edge of the cliff, and his mind became like a long white cloud. Before him lay the endless white, punctuated by the nunataks of the Borga range, then the pitted ice of the Pencksokket glacier, and far in the distance the black again of the Kirwanweggen, looking cold and immaculate in the air that did not diminish objects with distance. Three hundred kilometres could be seen on a clear day, from an elevation, and that was the furthest one could see on earth. As he felt her speak, as the continent whispered to him, here I am, have you yet perceived me, he thought of Boreana as he always had, always, always seeing the flash of gunfire in the rain. But he moved his mind instead to Cathedral Peak, the view there so unlike this, so packed with mountains, so crowded so colourful, and he believed that they were seeing with the same eyes there, with the same love of the country. He loved her, she was gone, but his mind held her, while he lived he would not forget her. He let loose his grip on Boreana at Stridbukken that day, at least to some extent. In the pure air, in the clarity and precision of his view of rock one hundred kilometres away, he shed tears, but for once the tears did not claim him.‘Goodbye,’ he whispered, ‘Goodbye my love.’‘I carry your heart,’ he told her, the girl that was gone, ‘I carry it in my heart.’

He stood up, and walked to the edge of the ridge that had brought him up her, and began glissading down it, and he had strength there that had not been before. This cold place, with its unimaginable, mythic beauty, was restoring him.

It was Rick Dillinger’s last season. He was the team leader, a brilliant, inspired and enthusiastic geologist obtaining the last samples and data he needed for his thesis. Because he was team leader, and because he required information across a broad area of Queen Maud Land, Damon was again privileged to be with him : they saw more of the interior than most of the overwinter team, who would spend fifteen months down south, most of them in the base; and even more than most geologists. The two of them would skidoo hundreds of kilometres over that season, visiting each of the four ranges in the South African area of Queen Maud Land. The Sverdrupfjella, the Kirvan, the Ahmallsruggen and the Borga. Many seasons spent here could not yield such extensive travel. And Day was grateful for it. Antarctica was a difficult place for him in some ways, with Boreana at the bottom of every breath, but as he went, so he healed, and he never felt the healing more than when they had lifted camp and were driving through colours, the three colours, black, blue and white, and he felt as if he and Rick were the only two people on the continent. They were alone in such vastness that no-one could ever comprehend it, not even Damon, who saw it each morning when he woke.

As the season drew on, the temperature dropped, until in the evenings, when the sun did dip closer to the horizon, temperatures less than minus thirty degrees became common. He wondered at the figure that made no sense, the figure of –89.6 degrees recorded at Vostok base, the lowest figure ever recorded, a full twenty degrees less than any figure recorded on any other continent on earth. The properties of life change at that temperature, a candle becomes obscured by a frozen hood of wax, steel shatters like glass when dropped, mercury becomes solid, and a fish hauled from the sea would within five seconds need cutting with a saw, so solid would it be.

Damon Ryan, in a tent in Rootshorga, in the Sverdrupfjella, with a view over the Jutelstraumen to Neumayer, to Mellibeneuten and the Kirvanweggen, took comfort from such temperatures as that. They made him feel positively warm by comparison. When the primus stove was well-cranked, and the tent assumed a glowing red from the sun struggling to set, a warm wave of heat would descend from the apex, over their heads to warm them completely. They were comfortable. And also, day after day, he had thawed, feeling the insult he offered nature by not believing in his own life. Nature he knew, did not care, but nature was beautiful and harsh enough for him to want to cling on to what she had given him. He chose life, and towards the end of the season, at times warm, but rapidly feeling the onset of winter, Damon Ryan was warmed from within too. He felt his fire return.

‘Mother-fucker!’ He screamed at the cold every morning, traipsing out to the toilet-bucket, dreading pulling his pants down. And Skarsnuten would answer “ucker, ucker, ka, ka, ka…” And from the tent, every morning Rick would shout “Bollocks,’ to echoes too, and Damon would smile as another day at the end of the world began.

He liked the travelling most. When they were on the rock, hammering out samples, taking measurements, drawing diagrams, he felt his lack of geological knowledge – he could understand the elementals of it, but his life had not contained the immense exposure to it that the geos had. Like mathematicians, their very language had altered to better express their realm, the realm of huge tracts of time, of unimaginable forces, of the chemical makeup and behaviour of the planet. He learned many things in the South about that behaviour, but none of them were equal to the nothing he learned when his yellow machine was running smoothly and up ahead Rick drove on, the only life and the only colour in a landscape as wide as a desert. As wide, and much emptier. He loved the feel of driving, picturing the topography of the land somewhere beneath him, the land that he could not see, flying over a hidden place supported only by condensed water. He was sailing over a continent, truly the Lost Continent, forever hidden beneath a gargantuan crush of ice, groaning under the unimaginable weight of it. He liked to imagine that huge land, hidden from eyes, as if Australia had suddenly become submerged underwater, only 1% of it revealed as islands, and he on a jet-ski sailing over it, it’s wrinkles and contours levelled finally by the uniform it now wore.

On days when they travelled, they would break camp, drive a full day, and then set camp again at the new location. It was lengthy, and sometimes hard work - it would take them two hours to pack up, and perhaps two and a half to reconstruct their home. Damon learned much in this process about his own country again - was always impressed by the sense of history that came with the most mechanistic of tasks. Since the early era of Antarctic exploration, through the time South Africans had their first team on the ice, in 1960, and their first base built in 1962, field-life had been enhanced and refined by experience, until now, when security and safety were entrenched in every aspect of their daily routine. Such easy and unshakeable professionalism by the Antarctic Program gave him a sense of security. So a camp was set-up just so, down to the detail of bed positions and bedding; after two or three times he could break camp without any thought, each can-opener, knife, stove and box of matches had a specific home. He could pack and unpack, and identify the location of any specific items like a housewife who had worked in the same kitchen for thirty years – Day got the same sense of confidence as that housewife perhaps did. Radio schedules were fixed, procedures in the event of missing schedules were well established. Any emergency, it felt to Damon, had been considered and was already prepared for.

So a sense of security was always with him, even when they became exposed to the underlying ferocity of the land, that was always skimming just beneath the surface of a given landscape.

He would take so many memories back home with him and because he was healing, coming to acceptance of his harsh past, those memories would take on an incredible vividness. True to the paradox of the South, that clarity would forever be accompanied by an inherent dream-like quality. Ever afterwards, when he thought of her, he could see scenes and images and places that his own eyes had witnessed, but when that light again became lodged in his memory, it was overlaid by the curious overcoat of another’s memory. Dreams of Antarctica would become that for him, they were memories, but they were also ephemeral, intangible. Simply, his memories were too fantastical to escape the feeling of being vivid imagining.

“Antarctica remains mythical,” he would write, or had he stolen the line from elsewhere? “Antarctica remains mythical, even for those of us who like to imagine we have been there.”

The most clear of the images that would remain with him, would become lodged in his head in times when the land bared its teeth.

At Neumayers, a storm kept them in the tent for six days. On the seventh, leaving for the journey to Sistenup, they awoke to a “dingle” day, a day so perfect it was as if it had been carefully and intricately manufactured. Dingle days were the days of silence, when a voice carried forever, and vision was unlimited by anything other then the purest space; in such air distance was not the designer of diminishment at all. On some such days he would think of the Drakensberg, of valley after valley stacking off into the horizon – here those further valleys would have the same striking sharpness as the near ones.

Their camp overlooked Neumayers, a face of rock kilometres long resting on its forearms, two offshoots that spilled from it and enclosed a large plain of ice pockmarked by crevasses. That day, as they departed and took a line along the front of the face of Neumayers, towards Oostvorrend (the eastern arm), the wind started picking up. It was only when Day raised his eyes, and looked through his riding goggles at the top of the escarpment, that he saw how sheltered they currently were. Above the rock, the wind coming from the pole was unimpeded, snow was being shovelled off the top in great plumes as the wind scoured the top, as if the whole mountain had been raised up until it made contact with the high jet-streams. They traced their route, approaching the limit of their protection by the face, and as they approached the turn to the south, passing the end of the face, Day could only stare in amazement as the full force of the wind became exposed. An ice-hump, a simple hillock providing a barrier to the torrent of air in front of them was acting as a snow-ramp, firing smoke and billows of snow a full eighty feet into the air, while the telltale signs of spindrift howled all around it.Day could see it now, they were in a fastflowing rush of air blowing straight from the pole, and only Neumayer had been standing in their way as protection. As they rounded the Eastern arm, it was like letting go of the rock and being suddenly exposed to the great force of the current. Snow-devils came hissing past them, Day had to weave to avoid them as his right hand and right side of his face froze instantly. He could feel the moisture in his right nostril harden instantly, bringing the pain of intense cold with it. And they battered through it, turning due south. Through to Issfosnipa, the Devil’s Staircase, the rise that would take them up to the polar plateau. Day would have turned back then, but Rick decided to go on, and they got stuck many times in the huge upwellings of snow and dug out, and pulled the laden sleds up forty degree slopes, the wind still howling, their fingers blue and aching. They crossed on that rise crevasses three metres across, covered in snow that miraculously held their weight, and they rose ever higher, climbing out of that lowland of storm. The rise ended and as they reached the plateau, the wind died slowly from the day, leaving it quiet as if in benediction.

When Day saw the ice-crystals forming on the guy-ropes of the tent, they were in a seven-day storm, unable to move fifty metres away from the camp. He deliberately walked backwards away from the red of the Scott tent, until he could just make it out, and then he turned so that he was facing away from it. Visibility was zero, and contrast was zero – if there had been the drop of a cliff in front of him he would not have seen it. Walking was arduous, almost impossible, his boots made contact with white when all around was white, he may as well have been walking in space. Every piece of light striking him from every angle held the same value, he was suspended in a soft glow of white, and he could see no ground in any direction; if he did a head-stand, there would be no difference in the view. And everywhere the silence, not even the hissing of snow. He was in a container of supreme nothing, but his consciousness was there, that was the single thing that populated the absolute whiteness.

And when Gerhardt and his team-mate joined them later in the season, they were still 5km away from Day and Rick’s camp on their skidoos when they descended in zig-zags down a massive ice slope. The slope was visible to Day, the skiddoos and riders were not. Day watched spellbound as tracks formed on the slope, miles away but clear as writing made by an invisible hand. A finger of an unseen god, doodling on the landscape. The contrast against the tracks rendered them clearly discernible even at such a great distance. The new team was announced by drawing on the landscape with their skidoo runners. But being hidden themselves it was as if the land itself was trying to communicate across the distance with D Ryan.

And one last memory, the most powerful of them all. It was late in the season, they were making back for the base; they had joined Dave and Gerhardt again. For the first time in fifty days, they were re-entering the Borga mountains, it felt like they were nearing home. All day the nunataks had danced in the air – from a distance Day could see no base to the blocks of rock, the air turned them into mushrooms, bulbous and even inverted sometimes. Only as they approached, crossing once more the Jutelstraumen, a glacier of moving ice bigger by far than the Amazon river, only as they came in, did the mountains right themselves and although all was deathly quiet on the glacier, as the black-rock resolved they could see the plumes blowing off every exposed surface, spindrift billowing off the top peaks, as if clouds were being created there.

Rick decided to make for Grunehogna, the old forward base, established specifically for the Earth Scientists. They headed north now, North towards the signs of habitation and exploration, and as they entered the Borga, the wind hit them. The ground became obscured with a writhing mosaic of spindrift, forming connected ribbons like sand blown on a beach. And miraculously, they were above it. The snow hugged only ten centimetres of the surface, converting solid surface to illusion. Two winds - there was only a high wind, pluming of the peaks and filling the air with snow between them and the sun, and surface wind, not even rising enough to feel it on their boots. Between these two planes – a high sky of blown smoke that did not fall to them, and the surface that could not be seen, they drove, while mountains provided the only blackness of solidity about them. And then in the distance, above the high hiss of the snow, the sound of rotors. An Oryx, returning from a depot pick-up. They stopped and Rick radioed their position, they saw the black dot suspended below the high plane, changing its flight path. As they climbed off the skidoos to wave, the wind rose up against them, like a stage-curtain rising the wrong way, the surface snow became kicked-up by the roaring wind, and the frenzy of the snow now threatened to batter them senseless. And through it all, the growing black of the chopper. “Incoming,” Gerhardt shouted, and they screamed and yelled, fighting for warmth as the wind pummelled them, and Day suddenly saw it from the chopper’s field of vision, the ground flying beneath the bird, great blasts of snow coming off the mountain walls and buffeting it, and in the valley ahead, four tiny figures, appearing and disappearing as the snowstorm settled over them.

Back on the ground the incredible machine suddenly increased in size, filling their view, and roared over them, just metres above, the downblast and the roar of sound competing with the storm going on about them. Subdued by the contrast, the violence of the landscape, and the great power of the machine that was still dwarfed by the massiveness of the landscape about them, they climbed aboard their machines again, and freezing now, they made it to Grunehogna to sit out the storm.

Blue, black, white, sound and light. Those were the secrets Day would take back with him, the secrets so few people are shown. Gold he would leave, because it was so rare and so utterly beautiful, he left even the memory of it behind on the southern continent. When he though of that land later, he would think of it under a sun that was at its highest, as it toiled on its route ineffectually in the sky. No, gold was too much for him, black and blue and white were enough.

It was not over, by no means. The team had to pack everything, remove it from the base and onto the Agulhas before winter set in. But for Day, and all the others who had been in the field, been so long exposed to the outside, the journey ended when they got back to the base. Then it was logistics and packing and planning once more, and at midnight, he would just walk in shorts and a shirt to the toilet, the outside world black now, the sun preparing to leave for nine months. He did not curse, and wake Rick up with his noise and the opening of the tent, allowing the bitter air to pour in like a river. He did not walk out over the frozen ground, in air so cold it was liquid, to urinate under a sky still light, with a thin alien sun; and he was not assailed by a coldness and blatant aloneness so profound it could never be explained to anyone.