The white desert - 1958

[London]: Hodder and Stoughton, [1958]. 205pp, [3]. With a sketch-map frontispiece and 31 photographic illustrations. Original publisher's navy cloth, lettered in gilt, pictorial dustwrapper. Very minor shelf-wear, dustwrapper rubbed, marked, chipped, and torn, spine panel sunned. Bookplate of George Lowe to FEP. The first edition of novelist and journalist Noel Barber's (1909-1988) first-hand account of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the first expedition to successfully complete the first overland crossing of Antarctic, led by Sir Vivian Fuchs with the support of Sir Edmund Hillary. From the library of New Zealand-born mountaineer George Lowe (1924-2013), a member of the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition, the ninth mountaineering expedition to attempt the first ascent of Everest, and the first confirmed to have succeeded when Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary reached the summit on 29th May. The day prior, Lowe had led an advance guard, wielding an ice axe with legendary skill, to cut a path into the Lhotse Face to the final camp (1,000 feet below the peak), preparing the route for Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Following this achievement Lowe became a New Zealand representative on the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition which, between 1955 and 1958, not only traversed Antarctica, becoming the first to reach the South Pole by land since Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912, but also carried out extensive surveying of the continent. . First edition. 8vo.