I've always been interested in the Antarctic. Years ago, I read a book about Ernest Shackleton's expedition, the one where his ship, the Endurance, got trapped in the ice, and I thought it was one of the greatest adventure stories I'd ever heard. I read the whole thing one hot summer weekend, lying in a hammock eating popsicles while these men were dragging lifeboats across the ice, and I remember thinking, what kind of a place is so big and so cold and so empty that it can crush a ship? There are people there right now, working at small research stations on the ice, in the middle of a darkness that lasts for months. And that's where we're going tonight, because it's the perfect setting for a sleep story. Everything about Antarctica is still. It's dark for months at a time, and it's quiet in a way that most of us have never experienced. And in the middle of all that vastness, there's this tiny warm building, full of people who have figured out how to sleep in the most extreme place in the world, and if they can sleep there, you can sleep here. And if you've ever wondered how sleep stories like this work, it's because they stop your mind from all the overthinking, and that's often what the problem is. You're lying in the dark, and your brain has nothing to focus on except itself, but a sleep story, it gives your mind somewhere else to go. Your thoughts follow the story, the way a dog follows a path, and while they're busy doing that, your body lets go. It slows down, it sleeps, but before we begin our usual reminder, please ensure that you are somewhere safe to fall asleep, and not anywhere you need to stay alert. There is a full disclaimer in our show notes, and if you're new here, welcome. I put two episodes out a week, Sundays and Wednesdays, and summer sleep stories like this one. Others use hypnotherapy or breathing techniques or guided visualization, and if it helps, don't forget to hit follow so you don't miss one. And a very quick shout out to our Australian listeners. One of the first people to ever find this show and hit follow was from Melbourne, so I made tonight's character from Melbourne, but you're all legends, so now, let's get you settled. Find your perfect position. For some of you, that'll be sleeping on your back, others curl up on their sides, some sleep on their stomach, with one leg bent up, like they're climbing a very slow, invisible ladder, whatever works for you. Take a moment, get everything where it needs to be. Just your pillow, get your blankets sorted, there's no rush. In a moment, I'm going to ask you to take a deep breath with me. When you do, I want you to feel your ribs expand, and then hold it for just a moment, and then let it go, slowly. If you're ready, breathe in deeply, feeling your whole body expand. And then hold, and then let it out. One more time. A deep breath in, and hold, and now release. Now let your breathing find its own pace. Just feel what it is to be still here, in the dark, in the quiet, in the comfort and safety of your bed. And then bring your attention to your face. Notice if you're holding any tension there, any tightness. Let your eyebrows drop, and let your jaw soften, and then your shoulders, let them drop away from your ears, and feel them sink into the mattress, heavy and loose. Feel the weight of your arms pulling them down.  And let that feeling travel downward, your lower back, feel it pressing into the mattress. Your thighs relaxing, your knees softening. Your feet have been carrying you around all day, and they are done. Feel how your whole body is heavier. We're going south to a place most people will never see, where the darkness lasts for months, and the ice is two miles thick, and a young man has just arrived for the first time, and all you have to do is follow my voice. Antarctica is a continent, most people don't think of it that way, they think of it as a place, a word, a white shape at the bottom of a map. But it is a continent, roughly the size of Australia, and almost all of it is covered in ice. In some places, the ice is more than two miles thick, beneath it, there's rock, and mountain, and valley, an entire landscape that almost no human being has ever seen. In winter, fewer than a thousand people live there, a thousand people on a space the size of Australia, the rest is ice, and wind, and dark. It is the coldest place on earth, and the driest, the windiest. It is technically a desert, but everything that falls, stays, because nothing melts. It has been accumulating for millions of years, layer upon layer, each snowfall pressing the one beneath it into ice, and the ice pressing the ice beneath it into something denser still, until the deepest layers contain air that was trapped there before human beings existed. Even now, with heated buildings, and cargo planes, and satellite phones, it is still the most remote place most people will ever go. There is no way to leave in winter. The last plane departs, the people who remain there aren't there until spring. He arrives in June, the plane lands on a runway carved from ice, guided by rows of lights staked into the ground, and when the rear door opens, the cold enters like a wall. It is not like any cold he has ever felt. It finds every gap, the half inch between his glove and his sleeve, the strip of skin above his collar, and the rims of his nostrils where the moisture freezes on his first breath. His eyelashes frost over. The snow beneath his boots is not the snow he knows from home. He grew up in Melbourne, where snow is something you drive three hours to see, and it is soft and wet. This snow is different. It is old and compressed, and so cold it has become something closer to sand. The surface glitters in the lights from the runway, millions of tiny crystals catching and releasing the light, and the wind pushes a fine layer of it across the ground in low, fast streams. The wind is constant. He pulls his balaclava up and ducks his head and walks the 40 meters from the plane to the building with his bag over his shoulder and his shoulders hunched against the wind. And his legs, which are very long legs, he is very tall, trying to find a steady rhythm on the unfamiliar surface. The door is heavier than he expected. It takes both hands and his shoulder, and when it swings shut behind him, there is the sound of a seal compressing, of the outside being locked out. The warmth comes in a wave, up from the floor and out from the walls. He stands in the entrance corridor and blinks. His eyelashes are wet. His nose is running. He wipes it with the back of his glove and looks around. The corridor is not what he imagined. He had pictured something industrial. Steel walls, strip lighting. Instead, it is wide and carpeted, and the light from the ceiling is soft and yellow. There are notice boards with pinned-up schedules and photographs. Someone has stuck a cartoon next to the fire extinguisher. It smells like coffee, and cooked food, and heated air being pushed through ducts. The station manager meets him in the corridor. She tells him to leave his outer gear on the rack. And she will show him around before he gets too tired. He unzips his jacket and hangs it on the nearest hook. She leads him through the building. There are laboratories down one wing. There are storage rooms with shelves of supplies. There's a laundry with machines running. The steady tumble of clothes behind round glass doors. She shows him the communications room and tells him the internet is slow and expensive. And he will learn to live without it. And he thinks that this is not entirely a bad thing. His job will be atmospheric monitoring. She explains this as they walk. He will check a series of instruments twice a day. Recording temperature, wind speed, humidity, barometric pressure, and the chemical composition of air samples. The instruments are housed in a small shelter 200 meters from the main building. Which means walking out into the cold every morning is important work. It feeds into climate models that researchers around the world depend on. He's looking forward to it. To the routine. To eventually knowing exactly what needs doing. And doing it properly. She takes him to the common room. And this is where the station stops feeling like a facility. And starts feeling like somewhere people live. There's mismatched furniture. Couches that have been sat on by hundreds of people. A bookshelf runs the length of one wall. And stuffed with paperbacks left behind by previous expeditions. The table in the middle holds a half-finished jigsaw puzzle. A painting of a sunny countryside. Green hills and blue sky. And he thinks it is funny that a jigsaw of a summer landscape is being assembled in the darkest place on earth. Five or six people are in the room. One is reading. One is writing in a notebook. Two are playing cards. One is asleep on a couch with a blanket pulled up to her chin. There's a man in a faded ACDC t-shirt who looks up from his cards. Sees him standing in the doorway. And makes a joke about the station not having been built for giraffes. There is an awkward silence as everyone waits to see if the new guy laughs. He looks down at the man. And for a moment, his face is uncertain. And then he laughs. It starts somewhere deep in his chest and comes out loud and genuine and surprised. The man is still asleep. The man in the t-shirt looks relieved. And the woman playing cards grins. And someone on the other couch glances up from the book and smiles. And the mood in the room lifts. The station manager walks him down another corridor toward the sleeping quarters. This part of the building is quieter. Some doors have small personal touches. A postcard. A nameplate. A pair of slippers outside. Behind one closed door. He can hear a guitar. And his room is small. A single bed with a thick mattress. And two pillows. And a duvet that looks heavier than anything he has ever slept under. There's a desk built into the wall. With a lamp. And a shelf. A small wardrobe. And a window with the blind down. Someone has left a folded towel on the bed. And a bar of soap on the desk in its paper wrapper. He unlaces his boots and pulls them off, and his feet feel suddenly free. He puts the boots by the door and sits for a moment in his socks on the edge of the bed. The room is quiet. He can hear the hum of the heating system. Beneath that, the generators, the deep pulse of the machines that keep this place warm and lit. He pulls off his clothes and climbs into bed. The duvet settles over him, and the weight of it releases a tension he did not know he was carrying. The sheets are cool for a moment, and then they are warm. And the warmth wraps around him, and he sinks into the mattress, and he closes his eyes. He is more tired than he realized. Three days of travel have left an ache in his back, a gritty feeling behind his eyes. But now his body has been given permission to relax and let go. The ice outside the station is alive with cold. If he were out there now, he would hear it. The ice makes sounds, deep groans that seem to come from far beneath the surface. The sound of unimaginable weight, shifting and adjusting, pressure releasing along fracture lines that run for miles. And the surface of the ice is not smooth and white, the way it looks in pictures. The wind has been sculpting the ice for thousands of years, and the result is a landscape that looks like a frozen sea. Crystals on the surface catch whatever light there is and scatter it into tiny points that shift and disappear and reappear as the wind moves the finest layer of snow across the top. Nothing grows on the ice, but at the edges of the continent, where rock meets ocean, life is found away. Seals haul themselves onto the ice near the coast, and they lie in groups, their bodies round and dark against the white. They are built for this cold, with a metabolism that runs like a furnace. In winter, they spend most of their time in the water beneath the ice, where it is warmer than the air above. Even now, somewhere out there in the dark ocean, a seal is rising through black water toward a small circle of gray light, taking a breath and sinking again. Above the station, the stars are packed, layered, dense, so many that the sky does not look dark at all, but crowded with light. The Southern Cross hangs low and clear, and around it, the Milky Way pours across the sky, and sometimes the aurora comes, the Southern Aurora. It begins as a faint green glow on the horizon, and then it builds curtains of light, green and violet, and sometimes red, folding across the sky like fabric in the slow wind. It makes no sound. The people who live here stop what they are doing. When the aurora appears, they stand at the windows, or they go outside and watch. But tonight, the sky is still, just the stars, thick and close, and beneath them, the ice, and on the ice, the station, small and bright, a single warm point, and all that, cold. Inside, the corridors are dim. The common room is now dark, and the jigsaw sits, half-finished, on the table. The kitchen is clean and quiet. The sleeping quarters are still. The man who made the joke about giraffes is sleeping, with his mouth open and one arm hanging off the bed. The heating system hums, and the generators pulse. The wind touches the walls and moves on. Thirty people sleep inside this building, and outside, the darkness goes on for a thousand miles. The dark does not diminish the warmth. The warmth does not diminish the dark. They exist together, the way they do every night, everywhere. He is almost asleep, the young man in his small room, with his duvet and his boots lined up by the door. He is at the bottom of the world, and he has never been further from home, and he is not afraid. He is warm, he is held inside a building that is held on top of ice, that is held on top of rock, and every layer is steady. Your room is dark, too, and your bed is warm. Whatever covers you tonight is doing the same work his duvet is doing, holding warmth in, keeping the world out. You don't need to be at the bottom of the world to find what he has found. You just need to be here, where you are, in your own bed, in your own dark. You're breathing, slowing, and your body settling, and your eyes closed. The station is sleeping, the ice is still, the stars are out, and the seals are breathing, and the wind is drawing its fine lines across the snow. Morning will come, it always does, even at the bottom of the world, but not yet, not for hours. Right now, there is just this, this warmth, this weight of what covers you, the slow, slow pull of sleep, and the dark that is not empty, but full, full of rest, full of quiet, full of the peace that comes when you stop fighting the night and let it hold you.