They went south into the ice.

Past the last known coast and the last known men.

The ship Belgica groaned in the black swell like some weary beast driven too far from the pasture of the living world. Her timbers creaked with the cold and the iron sang faintly in the night. The men spoke little. Words froze in the air between them and fell away like dust.



De Gerlache stood upon the deck, eyes turned to the horizon that was not a line but a wound—where the sea met the pale desolation and neither yielded. He had gathered them from all corners: Norwegians, Belgians, a young American doctor named Cook with the calm of the condemned, and Amundsen, lean and watchful, who seemed to already belong to another age. They went under the flag of science, though what they sought was not knowledge but the edge of the known world itself.



Then the ice closed behind them.



It came quiet as sleep, and when they woke it was done. The ship was trapped in a field of white without measure. The sea lay dead beneath them. The sun dipped and did not return. Darkness came down like a lid.



They waited. They marked the days though there were no days. The doctor spoke of food and light and the mind’s frailty. Men began to mutter, to see things that were not there. The stars turned slow in the frozen vault and the aurora flared like some god’s dying breath. In that unending night they became something else. Not explorers. Not men. Just the last flicker of warmth adrift on a world that would not have them.



When spring came, it was not mercy but reprieve. The ice broke its hold with a sound like the cracking of bone. They pushed free into gray waters strewn with ghosts of their own making. None spoke of what had passed. The world to which they returned was unchanged and indifferent.



And behind them the continent waited, vast and white and silent.