–from Douglas Mawson’s account, “The Home of the Blizzard”–
“Picture drift so dense that daylight comes through dully, though, maybe, the sun shines in a cloudless sky; the drift is hurled, screaming through space at a hundred miles an hour, and the temperature is below zero, Fahrenheit. You have then the bare, rough facts concerning the worst blizzards of Adelie Land. The actual experience of them is another thing.
“Shroud the infuriated elements in the darkness of a polar night, and the blizzard is presented in a severer aspect. A plunge into the writhing storm-whirl stamps upon the senses an indelible and awful impression seldom equalled in the whole gamut of natural experience. The world is a void, grisly, fierce and appalling. We stumble and struggle through the Stygian gloom; the merciless blast–an incubus of vengeance–stabs, buffets, and freezes; the stinging drift blinds and chokes.”
