Lammerson looked up, blinked into the light and then he stretched out his arm toward the immense map which stood to his right and cried, "Antarctica!" Five hundred souls shivered and held their breath at Lammerson’s feet. Lammerson tossed his head, his eyes flashing, his gapped teeth bared.I'm foolishly still writing the first draft of yet another novel, a thing called Nowhere But North. At this point, according to my design document, I'm about 40% of the way through the work. At this rate, I'll need a year to finish the draft. I am writing this book very slowly as compared to my previous first drafts. There is a huge amount of research reading to do, as well as certain interesting formal considerations that slow me down. Structure is tricky in this one, and I'm not writing it in the order that the material will be presented in the narrative. The above excerpt will eventually be found about a third of the way into the novel. I've already written the final chapter of the book. Next I'll write two middle sections, and then three beginning sections, and then one long scene that ties all of the sections together, running like a ribbon around/between nine longer pieces. It will all be clear on the trail, as the saying goes.
"The bottom of the Earth," Lammerson said. His Norwegian accent was a thick liquid, undulating around sharp points of consonant, a growling music that would’ve been comical in a smaller man but from Lammerson it seemed to sound forth out of another world, a world of danger and mystery.
"I have trod the ice of Antarctica on four separate expeditions, more than any other man alive. I know Antarctica well: her mountains, her blizzards, her plains of broken snowpack, her vastness, and her deadliness."
Lammerson spoke for nearly an hour, now and then leaping to the map to point out where his adventures had taken place.
"Here we first laid anchor along the shores of the Southern Ocean, more than a thousand miles below New Zealand. We marched to the southeast, parallel to this line of high coastal mountains that curve like a great archer’s bow and lead nearly to the Pole. East of the range, shown here in light blue, is a great sea, an enormous bay hundreds of miles wide that is covered over with thick plates of pack ice pressed up against the continent by the ocean currents. We pulled our sleds out onto the frozen bay and saw how it was not flat, as we’d thought from the ship, but was broken and buckled, immense slabs of dense white ice the width of villages, the height of cathedrals, all laying one atop and alongside the other, a vast waste that shone hard in the sun, blinding us nearly at mid-day, uninhabited by any man since the creation of the world. On this bay we spotted dark seals and giant penguins, which we tracked, hunted, killed and ate. The seals and penguins also live out beyond the edge of the land here, on great sheets of sea ice that float freely, encircling Antarctica in a magnificent halo. The orca, those huge fish who swim all of the earth’s cold oceans, even into the fjords of Norway, hunt beneath the sea ice, leaping up between the floes to snatch unwary seals and families of penguins. Antarctica is no pastoral and sleeping land, ladies and gentlemen. Antarctica is violently in motion, day in and day out. The pack ice filling the bay seems at first to be a solid and unchanging mass, a sculpture carved by God in millennia long past, but it is not. The sea moves beneath the ice to push and pull the surface, and we learned to our sadness that we trod over unstable ground.
"We dragged our sleds, making our way from the ship’s anchorage here, crossing the bay in this direction. At times we were forced to leap across narrow chasms whose bottoms we could not see. On the third day we reached the foot of what we’d taken to be a granite cliff. It was instead a high wall of ice, forced up from the surrounding slabs by Nature, its head rising a hundred feet into the air. My friend Lars, well-known in Oslo as a mountaineer, said he would climb the face of this gigantic slab and take photographs from the top. We could see that such a climb was possible, as the cliff was composed of long striations of blue and white ice, a natural ladder much like crushed breccia or weathered gneiss, almost a steep staircase, ladies and gentlemen. A trivial climb for an experienced mountaineer such as Lars. With his ice axe and hobnailed boots he made his way up quite easily, fifty or sixty feet above us, and then we felt the world shifting, the pack ice shrugging beneath our weight. Lars called out to us and then the face of the ice cliff collapsed; its many layers of blue and white tumbled down from the top to the bottom. Those of us below scrambled away and as I looked back I saw Lars disappear under countless tons of ice and snow that poured down upon him, a great wave of shale-like fragments the size of houses. We dug for an hour but found no sign of Lars. The next day we made our way off the ice and set foot on the continent itself."
Lammerson shook his head and walked back to the lectern, where he shrugged, adjusted his cuffs and tugged absently on the gold medal hung at his throat. He drank a glass of water and turned his attention back to the large map.
Also, the usual caveats about the text above being a rough draft all apply.