The journey, which would pass through the South Pole, was more than a thousand miles, and would traverse what is arguably the most brutal environment in the world. Sixty-two days earlier, on November 13, 2015, he’d set out from the coast of Antarctica, hoping to achieve what his hero, Ernest Shackleton, had failed to do a century earlier: to trek on foot from one side of the continent to the other.
According to his coördinates, he was on the Titan Dome, an ice formation near the South Pole that rises more than ten thousand feet above sea level. device to determine precisely where he was. The man, whose name was Henry Worsley, consulted a G.P.S. The temperature was nearly minus forty degrees Fahrenheit, and it felt far colder because of the wind, which sometimes whipped icy particles into a blinding cloud, making him so disoriented that he toppled over, his bones rattling against the ground. Get wet and you die, he often reminded himself. It was hard to breathe, and each time he exhaled the moisture froze on his face: a chandelier of crystals hung from his beard his eyebrows were encased like preserved specimens his eyelashes cracked when he blinked.
Every direction he turned, he could see ice stretching to the edge of the Earth: white ice and blue ice, glacial-ice tongues and ice wedges. The man felt like a speck in the frozen nothingness.
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