'Men have long dreamed of crossing the vast frozen wastes of the Antarctic, but not since Shackleton's last attempt to reach the Pole from the Weddell Sea in 1914 has anyone embarked on this great adventure. In turning the dream into reality Sir Vivian Fuchs has taken his place alongside Shackleton, Amundsen, and Scott, with a feat of courage and endurance that has rightly been called one of the truly heroic and magnificent achievements of the century.

 

On 24 November, 1957, twelve men set out from Shackleton Base equipped with eight vehicles, sledges and two dog teams to cross more than two thousand miles of unexplored snow and ice. In front of them lay unknown mountain ranges and an ice wall; there were vast areas in which innumerable crevasses, hidden by thin layers of snow, threatened to engulf the vehicles as the snow coverings collapsed; there were other areas in which the winds had piled the snow into serrated iron-hard ridges of ice that produced a surface like a choppy sea suddenly frozen.

 

To these hazards was added the dangerous phenomena of white-out, an atmospheric condition producing the Antarctic equivalent of a pea-soup fog, in which all sense of direction is lost. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Antarctic continent Sir Edmund Hillary probed the immense Skelton Glacier from the Ross Sea, and blazed a trail for the crossing party to follow after they had reached the Pole. To Hillary goes the achievement of reaching the South Pole by land for the first time since Captain Scott planted the British flag there forty-six years ago. This book is the full story told by the leader of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and by Sir Edmund Hillary, leader of the New Zealand support party.

 

Beginning with the landing of the advance party in November 1955 to establish a base on the Weddell Sea when, like Shackleton, Fuchs found his ship trapped by ice, it tells the story of the two years of preparation and reconnaissance that led up to the final attempt. It includes the daring crossing by air in a single-engined aeroplane, and the subsidiary expeditions made, during the crossing, into the mountain ranges that rear above the surface of the ice. But, above all, it is a thrilling story of men who set out into the vast loneliness of the unknown to discover what lay on and below a continent no one had ever traversed before and, in so doing, accomplished a feat of courage and endurance that will become a legend for succeeding generations.'.