Flying from Chicago to Shanghai on my return to Nanjing, our airplane traveled in a great parabola over the frozen desert of Hudson Bay, the Queen Elizabeth Islands, and northwestern Canada towards its vertex near the international dateline, and then arced downward over Siberia and the Verkhoyanskiy Mountains, Mongolia, and, finally, China. Outside my window somewhere over the Arctic Ocean, the pinkness of the dawnlike sky and the soft, powdery blueness of the clouds contrasted with the improbable full moon, glowing sharp bright and yellow as the sun, low on the horizon, over the endless ice and emptiness below. I have come this way before. I have never seen anything like this. Equally alien and beautiful, I at once understood the powerful and often fatal attraction felt by Arctic and Antarctic explorers driven to places like this. I don't have the words to truly describe what my eyes saw in those moments-I can only be thankful that they saw what they did.