![]() But the cracked and fissured ice-pack offers no comfortable reassurance - no glimmer of any reward to the traveller who has made his way to the top of the world. ![]() ![]() I'm sure I'm not the only one of us looking down on this desolate wilderness who hasn't wished, for an impure moment, that the North Pole, rather than being in the middle of an ocean, was solid, well marked and even supplied with a hut and a coffee machine. Below the ice the sea is 14,000 feet deep. In little more than ten minutes our pilot will have to fashion a landing strip out of nothing more than a piece of ice - strong enough to withstand an impact of 12,500 lbs at eighty miles an hour. Outside my window one of our two propeller-driven engines slowly eats away at a fuel supply which must last us another six hours at least. With our two pilots, Russ Bomberry and Dan Parnham, we are the only human beings within 500 miles. With me are Nigel Meakin and his camera, Fraser Barber and his tape-recorder and Roger Mills and his pipe. I'm squeezed tight into a small, noisy aeroplane descending through stale grey cloud towards an enormous expanse of cracked and drifting ice. Events On the way to the North Pole, the Ice Walker is destroyed and the polar expedition is stranded for ten days, during which Fogg may perish if Passepartout is unable to find aid for him from the other crewmen. Somewhere, a long way away, people are doing sensible things like watching cricket or digging gardens or pushing prams or visiting their mothers-in-law. It is situated in the Arctic Ocean and can only be reached from Smeerenburg via Ice Walker. It's 3.45 on a Saturday afternoon and I'm seventeen miles from the North Pole. This incredible journey involves skiing the final ten days of the trek to the South Pole, using sleds to haul our provisions.
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