The Ice is organized, like Dante's Inferno, into concentric rings. To journey to its source region is to pass through an increasingly ice-dominated landscape until land itself vanishes into exclusionary ice. The reductionism of The Ice is relentless. Ice replaces everything that is not ice. Ice confines ice.
Ice defines ice.
A continent is reduced to a single mineral. In Antarctica more is less. It is a subworld, Antarctica, not readily visited or understood. This antipodal vortex does not draw but repels. Travel is opposed not so much by active resistance as by a fantastic passivity that leaches away all that is essential to sustain life and thought.