It is the coldest, windiest, driest place on earth, an icy desert of unearthly beauty and stubborn impenetrability. For centuries, Antarctica has captured the imagination of our greatest scientists and explorers, lingering in the spirit long after their return. Shackleton called it "the last great journey"; for Apsley Cherry-Garrard it was the worst journey in the world. This is a book about the call of the wild and the response of the spirit to a country that exists perhaps most vividly in the mind. Sara Wheeler spent seven months in Antarctica, living with its scientists and dreamers. No book is more true to the spirit of that continent--beguiling, enchanted and vast beyond the furthest reaches of our imagination. Chosen by Beryl Bainbridge and John Major as one of the best books of the year, recommended by the editors of Entertainment Weekly and the Chicago Tribune, one of the Seattle Times's top ten travel books of the year, Terra Incognita is a classic of polar literature. "A triumph . . . I cannot believe that anything better will ever be written about Antarctica." --Daily Telegraph "Compelling . . . leaves the reader with a visceral understanding of the mysterious, even sublime power the poles have exerted on the human imagination, and the desolate beauty that resides there amid the glaciers and icebergs and penguins." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "I have read many accounts of polar exploration, but never one which so touchingly describes its emotional topography. . . . What she has done could not be done better." --Richard Eyre, The Independent "The first funny book about Antarctica." --Los Angeles Times It is the coldest, windiest, driest place on earth, an icy desert of unearthly beauty and stubborn impenetrability. For centuries, Antarctica has captured the imagination of our greatest scientists and explorers, lingering in the spirit long after their return. Shackleton called it "the last great journey"; for Apsley Cherry-Garrard it was the worst journey in the world. This is a book about the call of the wild and the response of the spirit to a country that exists perhaps most vividly in the mind. Sara Wheeler spent seven months in Antarctica, living with its scientists and dreamers. No book is more true to the spirit of that continent--beguiling, enchanted and vast beyond the furthest reaches of our imagination. Chosen by Beryl Bainbridge and John Major as one of the best books of the year, recommended by the editors of Entertainment Weekly and the Chicago Tribune, one of the Seattle Times's top ten travel books of the year, Terra Incognita is a classic of polar literature. Sara Wheeler  is the author of many books of biography and travel, including  Access   All Areas: Selected Writings 1990–2011  and  Travels in a Thin Country:   A Journey Through Chile .  Terra Incognita: Travels   in Antarctica  was an international bestseller that  The New York Times  described as "gripping, emotional" and "compelling," and  The Magnetic North:   Notes from the Arctic Circle  was chosen as Book of the Year by Michael Palin and Will Self, among others. Wheeler lives in London. INTRODUCTION   “It is the last great journey left to man,” Shackleton said. He didn’t mean that we all had to pack our crampons and set off, ice axes in hand. For Shackleton, Antarctica was a metaphor as well as an explorer’s dream. “We all have our own White South,” he added. It is true that for me Antarctica was always a space of the imagination—before, during and after my own journey. No cities, no bank managers, no pram in the hall. It has been said that before the ice came Antarctica was the site of Atlantis, the ancient civilization that disappeared in a cosmic gulp. When I went there I learned that Atlantis is within us.   Until I was 30, my relationship with Antarctica was confined to the biannual reinflation of the globe hanging above my desk, its air valve located in the middle of the misshapen white pancake at the bottom. As far as I was then aware, the continent was little more than a testing ground for men with frozen beards to see how dead they could get. Then, in 1991, I traveled several thousand miles through Chile for a book I was writing. As I prodded around in the hinterland of the national psyche I discovered that the country did not come to a stop in Tierra del Fuego. A small triangle was suspended at the bottom of every map. They called it Antártida chilena. So one day in February I hitched a lift from Punta Arenas to King George Island, off the tip of the spindly Antarctic peninsula, on an antediluvian Hercules belonging to the Chilean Air Force.   With nothing but Chile on my mind and a carpetbag on my shoulder I climbed down the steps of the plane into the rasping air and shook the bearpaw extended by the wing commander who had been appointed as my minder. I looked out over the icefields vanishing into the aspirin-white horizon. Above them, a single snow petrel wheeled against the Hockn