A hand steadied me through the entrance. The interior was in maroon quilting, dark as the storm in the south-west. " Welcome aboard, Herr Kapitan," said the man.

I should have remembered the cocksureness, and the slight sneer of the Germanic gutturals. His hair was blond and over-long. The steadying grip, too-that wasn't learned anywhere except in bringing a man over the side-the side of a ship, not an aircraft.

" Thank you," I said. " It was a magnificent piece of rescue work."

He shrugged and nodded forward to the cockpit. " Not me to thank," he said. " Up there."

I parted the quilting and stood behind the pilot's seat. Tiny beads of sweat lay on the leather shoulders of the flying suit. The pilot did not look round. The Island Cock was perched on the compass mounting, gripping it with its oversize talons. I saw a pair of eyes in the rear-view mirror above the bird's perch.

They were a woman's eyes.

Women simply don't exist in the Southern Ocean. They have been known, like black icebergs. There are, it is true women's names in Antarctica-Marie Byrd Land, Edith

Ronne Land, Sabrina Coast. But the women were not there. They were at home.

I could not credit what I saw. I stepped forward, the thanks dying on my lips in surprise. I looked look at her, the face framed by the black leather helmet and its intercom wires. The eyes were the strangest and the most beautiful I had ever seen. They were the colour of the sea, I thought. Later, I knew they were not. Like the South African flower which ha g no colour in itself, but takes its turquoise from the refraction of white light within its own heart, so hers reflected what she was seeing-the sea, and the angry storm. The pupils were, like the central spot of that same strange flower, almost green-black by virtue of some other intriguing juxtaposition of fabric and light.