ICE!

The boat was now completely frozen in. There was nothing but ice and darkness in all directions."" And for 15 months, alone on his small craft Creswell (befriended only by his three-legged, one-eyed Labrador dog named--of course--Nelson), Tris Jones never sees a human face or hears a human sound but that of a distant, passing airplane. As in his The Incredible Voyage (1977), Jones strains at the limits of human endurance and at the boundaries of his glorious Welsh diction to perform a task never before done. In Voyage he sailed from the lowest water level on earth (The Dead Sea) to the highest (Lake Titicaca), a height of three miles; in the new book he reviews an early adventure in trying to better Nansen's voyage through the Arctic Ocean by sailing his craft even farther north than the great explorer reached. The high spots of the attempt are simply tremendous: Tris is chopping ice from his mast in a rolling blizzard, and a block bursts, laying open his forehead and popping his eyeball onto his cheek. Storms are introduced by ""power and light beyond imagination . . . the fireworks of the gods, sending showers and fountains of streaking, liquid sparks across the black arch of the arctic sky."" But worse is ahead, much, much worse, as his gigantic, top-heavy iceberg capsizes. The finale is a sobbing shock of pent-up feelings released.