ONCE UPON AN ODYSSEY

While sailing the Antarctic, a writer makes a thrilling discovery: an EXTRAORDINARY SHIP'S LIBRARY assembled with an explorer's heart.

- MADELINE WEINFIELD

No one just goes to Antarctica.

They journey there, slowly, an experience that unfolds page by page, like a long, adventurous book. By the time I reach what feels like the bottom of the earth, I've been traveling for the better part of a week. Even in the Antarctic summer, the temperatures are brisk enough to necessitate only brief excursions outside into the white desert, and so it happens that on one of the most adventurous trips of my life, I find myself doing a remarkable amount of sitting.

I sit on planes from Washington, D.C., to Houston and Buenos Aires and finally to Ushuaia in the far south of Argentina.

There at the gateway to Patagonia, a land of mountains jagged like new teeth, I board the expedition ship Viking Polaris. For the next two days and nights, I sail across the Drake Passage, the notorious body of water that has swallowed ships and sailors for centuries under the merciless southern confluence of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Sailing past magnificent icebergs and Adélie and gentoo penguins on Petermann Island (opposite, bottom), the ship's 4,500volume library (opposite, top) is an inquisitive voyager's oasis.

And though the feeling of first laying eyes on Antarctica the highest, driest, coldest continent has been depicted in journals of explorers from Sir Ernest Shackleton and Roald Amundsen to Robert Falcon Scott, no amount of reading would have prepared me. It is like encountering the earth before it was the earth, seeing every color of the planet reflected in snow so pure and untouched it appears to glow.

But a second discovery is also crystallizing, one that would, of course, have been mostly unthinkable on Shackleton's ill-fated Endurance or Amundsen's Fram.