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1、Text 2Visions On Ice Information related to the text1)About the text:Wally Herbert is a polar explorer of International distinction - the greatest polar explorer of our time, according to Sir Ranulph Fiennes; a phenomenon according to the late Lord Shackleton, and a man whose determination and coura
2、ge, according to His Royal Highness, Prince Charles, are of such heroic proportions that his country should mark his achievements eventually by having him stuffed and put on display!Meanwhile, in recognition of his polar achievements, he has received a string of those more conventional honors and aw
3、ards: among them the Polar Medal and bar; the gold medals of several Geographical Societies, and the highest honor of the Explorers Club (the so-called Explorers Medal). He has a mountain range and a plateau named after him in the Antarctic; the most northerly mountain in the Svalbard Group named af
4、ter him in the Arctic and, besides being an explorer with biographical entries in Whos Who in the World, the encyclopedias and the Guinness Book of Records, he is also a prize winning author with nine books so far to his credit, and an artist whose paintings are now owned by Royals and investors all
5、 over the World.In 1999, Wally Herbert was knighted in recognition of his achievements. 2)Language notes:1. Shackleton called it a phenomenon and HRH Prince Philip, the expeditions patron, hailed it as an achievement which ranks among the greatest triumphs of human skill and endurance.In the sentenc
6、e the word phenomenon means a wonder. e.g. The huge success of her books makes her a remarkable phenomenon of the mid-1970s.2. Today, among his contemporaries in polar exploration Herbert is a guru and Sir Ranulph Fiennes says: 怕.3. His navigation, field craft and logistics are superb and his awaren
7、ess of what dogs can and cant do unparalleled.Logistics:后勤 4.Inverness ，a port city in Britain.5.In his environment, Herbert is the Sean Connery of all James Bonds. Sean Connery:(1930-) British actor, most recognized for starring as the sophisticated British secret agent James Bond.6.It was precisel
8、y the moment that the Astronaut Jack Young took the famous photograph of the Earthrise from the moon. Earthrise:地出（从月球或宇宙飞船，地球似从月球的地平线升起） 7.A physiotherapist would probably tell me that I didnt want to be a child, which is probably true. Physiotherapist: a doctor who uses physiotherapeutic methods t
9、o treat patients.8.Gradually Herbert achieved historic journeys, mapping some 38 000 square miles of previously unexplored country in the Nimrod Glacier region and the Queen Maud Range from 1960-62 and retracing Amundsens route on the Axel Hiberg Glacier on the fiftieth anniversary of his descent of
10、 those icefalls in 1952.The word map can be used as a verb which means to draw a map of. 9.And then with soaring ambitions he returned to England to gather the support of distinguished polar explorers so that the Royal Geographical Society would approve his expedition to cross the Arctic Ocean.Royal
11、 Geographical Society:英国皇家地理学会。10.In 1971 he set out with his wife and baby daughter, Kari for north-west Greenland to live with the Polar Eskimos.Polar Eskimos:住在极地的爱斯基摩人。11.His youngest daughter Pascale was killed in a freak electrical accident four years ago which the whole family are struggling
12、to come to terms with. Come to terms with: to accept the reality of.Text 2 Visions on Ice Wally Herbert is the greatest pioneering polar explorer alive today. Here is a man who led the British Trans-Arctic Expedition, a 16-month, pioneering journey of 3 800 miles, much of it in the pitch darkness, o
13、ver a moving ice ocean that was constantly shifting and breaking up, with three men and a team of four dogs. This journey, it is now universally agreed, was the last great journey left on the face of the earth. A journey that no one since has even dared attempt. This was a geographical first that ra
14、nked alongside climbing Everest and the first surface crossing of the Southern and Northern icecaps of the Earth. Thirty years on from this journey Wally Herbert is the last link between the explorers from the heroic age of exploration and our modern day adventures. Yet he has never been honored for
15、 his outstanding achievement in Polar exploration. This is despite the fact that Prime Minister Harold Wilson claimed the Trans-Arctic journey as a feat of endurance and courage which ranks with any in polar history, Shackleton called it a phenomenon and HRH Prince Philip, the expeditions patron, ha
16、iled it as an achievement which ranks among the greatest triumphs of human skill and endurance.Today, among his contemporaries in polar exploration Herbert is a guru and Sir Ranulph Fiennes says: Ive grown up thinking hes the greatest of the polar travelers of today. His navigation, fieldcraft and l
17、ogistics are superb and his awareness of what dogs can and cant do unparalleled. Wally is very genuine and if I had to pick out of all the travelers who are alive today, Wally is the greatest by a big head. Herbert has helped many a young adventurer on his way, with crucial advice on equipment, mapp
18、ing and contacts. None of these men have retraced his pioneering journeys in the Antarctic or the Arctic.To mark the anniversary of Herberts expedition reaching the North Pole on the 60th anniversary of Robert E Pearys discredited claim to have done so first, an exhibition of Herberts polar painting
19、s will be showing at the Atlas Studio Gallery in London. For nowadays, Herbert, aged 64, has become a polar painter, etching out the most detailed, intense and moving scenes from polar history and the present that have influenced his life. At Inverness airport, Wally and his wife Marie are waiting t
20、o meet me. I get a good look at him before he does me. He is diminutive, 5 foot 8 inches, not the usual macho image of a great explorer but he has on a coat designed for the Arctic weather, with a fur-lined hood, framing a grizzly beard and small sparkling eyes. His posture is unimposing and his sho
21、ulders a little hunched. Marie gives me a warm welcome. The Herberts have never owned a house of their own and they are presently renting a doll-size white-washed bothy, overlooking the Spey valley. The view of the rolling hills is impressive but the noise from the small, occasionally busy road aggr
22、avates Wally. He craves silence.See me in my environment, he urges before we start the interview proper. He shows me a film of his life in the Arctic and past journeys that is currently in post-production. When he is in the Arctic, the shackles and difficulty that he finds with life in Britain are s
23、haken off and he visibly relaxes.In his environment, Herbert is the Sean Connery of all James Bonds. He is softly spoken, glowing and confident. On film, he reminisces passionately of the fear he felt before setting out on his Trans-Arctic journey. Looking ahead at the journey was psychologically ve
24、ry frightening because while he had traveled in the footsteps of Shackleton, Scott and Amundsen, no one had ever attempted this journey. Finding the North Pole was rather like stepping on the shadow of a bird hovering overhead. This was because the ice was constantly moving and the sun only intermit
25、tently appearing to let them take their reading. Like Robert E Peary before them had done, they nearly missed it. The story is an amazing one: On 5 April 1969 Herbert messaged Her Majesty the Queen, I have the honor to inform your Majesty that on the 5th April by dead reckoning we reached the North
26、Pole. However, once the sun had come out he realized that the group had drifted off course and in order to get that all important proof they struggled on. It was not until the next day that they actually reached the North Pole and by amazing coincidence this was the very same day that Pearsy had cla
27、imed to have done so too on 6th April 1909. Herbert places a lot of emphasis on some very strange coincidences which lead him to believe that there is a soul connection with explorers of that region and discovery of the world and its environment as a whole. As the expedition headed home they photogr
28、aphed their first siting of land for 16 months. It was precisely the moment that the Astronaut Jack Young took the famous photograph of the Earthrise from the moon. Strangely too, at the end of journey they touched land at the exact moment, that 16 years earlier Hillary and Tensing had reached the s
29、ummit of Mount Everest.For me this first sight of land meant so much. The earth was like a precious jewel and that moment changed my life. It was from then that I began searching for the Third Pole. Herberts spiritual quest has, he says, been as tough and demanding as his physical one.His childhood
30、was spent with his mother and sister on a ranch in the Drankensberg mountains, in South Africa with his father absent in World War II. Herbert has few memories of this time. I remember almost nothing until the age of twelve. A physiotherapist would probably tell me that I didnt want to be a child, w
31、hich is probably true. I was not close to either of my parents or my sister and the moment that my voice broke was a great relief.One of Herberts earliest memories is aptly a journey on ice. At the age of twelve, for a bet of five shillings, he walked across the River Severn on extremely thin ice, f
32、or which he was promptly beaten by his father. The first man to fire Herberts imagination was The Reverend Norman Gurney, who had sailed as the boatswain on the Penola, the last expedition which had ventured under sail to the Antarctica in 1932. As a choirboy, Herbert would sit enthralled at the cur
33、ates sermons which would be full of tales of Arctic adventure rather than the more conventional biblical stories. This was when Herbert resolved to become a District Officer somewhere in Colonial Africa or failing that, an explorer.However, his family had other ambitions for their dreaming son. To s
34、erve Queen and country was every mans destiny in the Herbert family, as it had been for the past four hundred years. At the age of 17, he was frog-marched to the nearest recruiting office and signed up for 22 years. Luckily for him he discovered a clause in his contract that gave him the option to q
35、uit after three years. Meanwhile, he hated every moment. I am not a team player, I hated doing these pointless things which I felt were an insult to our intelligence. I was brutalized in the army.When Herbert left the army in 1955 he hitch-hiked home from Egypt, through Turkey, Greece and Italy, dra
36、wing portraits for his food and shelter, and as often, sleeping rough. My father did not speak to me for three years but by the time I returned home from the Antarctic, having hitch-hiked 15 000 miles from Uruguay, he was proud of me and we became friends. He would take me to the pub and being an ar
37、my man would always march in step with me which I would always purposefully break.What I deeply regret is that I never told my father that I wanted to have his scrapbook of sporting and military achievements. When I was doing my Arctic journey he made a huge scrap book with all the international cli
38、ppings. But when it had grown to two large volumes, he burnt his own book. I was so sad about that. With his mother, he says, I had little contact. We spoke politely to each other but I felt embarrassed when she was concerned for me. She was very gentle.So where did he get his sense of mission? Was
39、it driven by ego and arrogance? My sense of mission was always historical, he explains. It was not so much the physical prowess and the macho thing, although I have come to recognise the value of ego and arrogance in an explorer because without them I simply would not have attempted any of these jou
40、rneys. I believed totally that we would succeed and would not have gone if I had thought otherwise. For the first two years I was in the Antarctic I was in awe of many explorers but then I began to have the authority to challenge them.One day in 1955 he spotted two advertisements in the Telegraph fo
41、r jobs in the Antarctic. He was selected at the age of 22 to join the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, based at Hope Bay on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.Gradually Herbert achieved historic journeys, mapping some 38 000 square miles of previously unexplored country in the Nimrod G
42、lacier region and the Queen Maud Range from 1960-62 and retracing Amundsens route on the Axel Hiberg Glacier on the fiftieth anniversary of his descent of those icefalls in 1952. Between 1962 and 1963, Herbert worked frantically for a year in New Zealand to draw and publish this map before the Ameri
43、cans did. And then with soaring ambitions he returned to England to gather the support of distinguished polar explorers so that the Royal Geographical Society would approve his expedition to cross the Arctic Ocean. In 1966 he wintered with the Polar Eskimos of North-West Greenland in order to learn
44、their ways and techniques on the ice. Herbert set out from Greenland the following spring re-tracing the 1908 outward route of Dr Freerick Cook, a journey of 1 500 miles. Although the journey across the top of the world roundly was applauded it was badly timed because the eyes of the world were fixe
45、d on an event of larger historical significance, mans first landing on the moon. And so Wally Herbert returned from the Arctic with a huge financial debt and sense of failure. Married on Christmas Eve 1969 to Marie, he settled down to write two books but soon he needed another journey. In 1971 he se
46、t out with his wife and baby daughter, Kari for north-west Greenland to live with the Polar Eskimos. Then came a period of reflection and inner-struggle as Herbert set out to write Pearys biography and reluctantly disprove his heros claim to be the first man to the North Pole. This was the blackest
47、cross-roads of my entire life, he says. But worse was still to come. His youngest daughter Pascale was killed in a freak electrical accident four years ago which the whole family are struggling to come to terms with. Having diced with death more than most men on earth, he now believes in reincarnati
48、on. When Im awake I am never, and never have been, afraid of death. Ive always been afraid of death through nightmares. For example during my Polar days, if I fell down a crevasse or into the sea through thin ice, I had already done it so many times in my dreams that I knew what to do. So when it ha
49、ppened for real, I had gone through the agony of dying in these situations already and I picked the method in which I lived happily ever after.(1816 words) TOP 课文二冰上之景威利赫伯特是当今仍健在的最伟大的，最早探险极地的人。就是他率领三个人四条狗组成的“英国穿越北冰洋探险队”，历时16个月，跋涉3800英里，首次极地探险。此次探险的大部分时间他们都是在漆黑一片，浮冰不断漂流和碎裂的大洋上度过的。现在人们普遍认为这次旅程是“人类在地球表面留下