Antarctica Read online

  “Taken.”

  “I can’t believe they camped in such an exposed place.”

  “They wanted to be close to the penguins.”

  “Yeah, but still.”

  Indeed, Val thought. She would never have set a camp here on the ridge; it was one of the last places on Cape Crozier she would have chosen. And Wilson had known it was exposed to the wind, his diary made that clear. But he had decided to risk it anyway, because he too had been concerned about losing their camp in the darkness, and he had wanted it to be where they could find it at the end of their trips out to look for penguins. Fair enough, but there were other places that would have been relocatable in the dark. Putting it up here had almost cost them their lives. Oddly, Cherry-Garrard had claimed in his book that the hut had been located on the lee side of the ridge, thus protected from direct blasts; he had also explained that later aerodynamic science of which Wilson could not have been aware had revealed that the immediate lee of a ridge was a zone of vacuum pull upward, which is what had yanked their roof off when the wind reached Force Ten. But since the shelter actually was right on the spine of the ridge, as Hillary had noted (Val was pretty sure she could see it down in the saddle below her, a big hump of snow among other big humps of snow) it was hard to know what Cherry had been getting at—either making excuses for Wilson’s bad judgment, or else so blind he truly hadn’t known where they had been.

  “It certainly looks like another stupid move to be chalked up against the Scott expedition,” Elliot said.

  “Maybe it’s infectious,” Geena said. “A regional thing.”

  “Below the 40th latitude south,” Elliot intoned “there is no law. Below the 50th, no God. And below the 60th, no common sense.”

  “And below the 70th,” Geena added, “no intelligence whatsoever.”

  There was little Val could say to contradict them. After all, here were a couple dozen people staggering around in a frigid wind, just to the left, the right, the before and the beyond of an oval rock wall that any of them could have found after a ten-second consultation with their GPS. One of them was actually tripping over the end of the shelter at this very moment!

  But Val said nothing.

  It got colder.

  “These Footstep things,” Geena complained. “Want some hot chocolate?”

  “I like them,” Elliot said, taking the thermos from her. “You get to add historical footage to the usual stuff, it’s great.”

  “Be careful, it’s hot.”

  “I worked for Footsteps Unlimited for a while. Popularly known as F.U., because that’s what the clients were most likely to say to each other after they got back.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “I also freelanced for Classic Expeditions of the Past Revisited, which its guides called Stupid Expeditions of the Past Revisited, because the trip designers always chose the very worst trips in history, sometimes with the original gear and food.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. But you’ll notice they’re out of business now.”

  “Masochist travel—a new genre, still underappreciated.”

  “It’ll catch on. All travel is masochist. People will do anything. I shot Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, elephants included—Marco Polo, Italy to China by camel—Scott’s walk to the Pole—Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.” He pulled up his facemask and drank from the thermos. “That one was colder than this.”

  “Wow. I shot a gig with Condemned to Repeat It once, where we followed Stanley’s hunt for Livingstone. People said it was more dangerous to do now than it was then.”

  “Condemned to Repeat It?”

  “You know—those who know history too well are condemned to repeat it.”

  “Ah yeah. But some of those old trips are unrepeatable no matter what, because they were impossible in the first place.”

  “Sure. I heard Shackleton’s boat journey was a total disaster.”

  Val’s stomach tightened. She had guided that one herself, and did not want to talk or think about it. Now she saw Elliot making a gesture with his thumb up her way, to warn Geena. That’s the guide right there, shhhh, don’t mention it! God. What a thing to be known for. Val had guided every Footsteps expedition in Antarctica, from Mawson’s death march to Borchgrevink’s mad winter ship, even fictional expeditions like the one in Poe’s “Message Found in a Bottle” (including the whirlpool at the end), or in Le Guin’s “Sur” (the latter of which ended with an emotional meeting with the author, the women thanking her for the idea and also making many detailed suggestions for logistical additions to the text, all of which Le Guin promised to insert the next time she revised it)—all these very difficult trips guided, practically every early expedition in Antarctica re-enacted—and what was she remembered for? The fiasco, of course.

  Suddenly there were wild shouts from down the ridge. George and Ann-Marie were standing next to the snowy hump Val had picked out as the likely site.

  “Show time,” Elliot declared, and hefted his camera pack. “I hope this baby stays warm enough to keep its focus.”

  George had Elliot and Geena and the other camera operators shoot him and Ann-Marie re-enacting the rediscovery of the hut, their shouts thin compared to the happy triumph of the originals. Then they tromped back down to the dining tent, and ate the happiest meal they had had so far, while Val set up the rest of the sleeping tents. After that they slept through the long dark hours of the night, snug in their ultrawarm sleeping bags, on their perfectly insulated mattress pads. By the first glow of twilight on the next day they were all back on the ridge and working around the mound, some of them carefully clearing ice and snow away from the stacked rocks with hot-air blowers and miniature jackhammerlike tools, the others building a little wooden shelter just up the ridge; for they were there to undo the work of Edmund Hillary, so to speak, and return all of the belongings of Wilson’s group that Hillary and his companions had found and taken away.

  The rock shelter itself was a small oval of rough stacked stones, many of them about as heavy as a single person could lift. The old boys had been strong. The wall at its highest was three or four rocks tall. The interior would have been about eight feet by five. The old boys had been small. They had put one of their two sledges over the long axis of the oval, then stretched their green Willesden canvas sheet over the sledge, and laid the sheet as far over the ground as it would go, and loaded rocks onto this big valance, and rocks and snow blocks onto the roof itself, until they judged the shelter to be as strong as they could make it. Bombproof; or so they had thought. A small hole in the lee wall had served as their door, and they had set up their single Scott tent just outside this entryway, to give them more shelter while affording the tent some protection from the wind, Val assumed; Wilson’s reason for setting up the tent when they had the rock shelter had never been clear to her. Anyway, the shelter had been pretty damned strong, she could see; the wind that destroyed it had not managed to pull the canvas out of its setting, but had instead torn it to shreds right in its place. As she had on her previous visits, Val kneeled and dug into the snow plastering the chinks in the wall, and found fragments of the canvas still there in the wall, more white than green. “Wow.”

  And looking at the frayed canvas shreds, Val again felt a little frisson of feeling for the three men. It was like looking at the gear in the little museum in Zermatt that Whymper’s party had used in the first ascent of the Matterhorn: rope like clothesline, shoes, light leather things, with carpenter’s nails hammered into the soles…. Those old Brits had conquered the world using bad Boy Scout equipment. Like this frayed white canvas fragment between her fingers. A real piece of the past.

  Not that they didn’t have a great number of other, larger real pieces of the past, there with them now to return to the site. For Wilson and his comrades had left in a hurry. The storm that had struck them had first blown their tent away, and then blown the canvas roof off their shelter; after that they had lain in their sleeping bags in a thick
ening drift of snow for two days, the temperatures in the minus 50s, the wind-chill factor beyond imagining—singing hymns in the dark to pass the time, although with their tent gone they were doomed, with no chance at all of getting back to Cape Evans alive. So when the wind had abated enough to allow them to stand, and they had gotten up and wandered around in the dark, and miraculously found their tent at the foot of the ridge, stuck between two boulders like a folded umbrella, they had carried it to their shattered camp and packed what they could find into one sledge and left immediately, in a desperate retreat for their lives. Thus began the third and worst stage of the Worst Journey, when they had hauled the sledge asleep in their traces, and slept in sleeping bags that had become nothing more than bags of ice cubes, which were nevertheless warmer than the air outside.

  So when Hillary and his men had come on the site forty-six years later, they had found a lot of gear scattered about. They had collected it all up and put it in their farm tractors, and taken it all back with them to Scott Base at the other end of Ross Island; eventually it was all taken back to New Zealand, where the items were distributed to a number of Kiwi museums. Cherry-Garrard, still alive at the time, had written from England to approve this recovery and disposal of the gear, although since it had already been done when he was asked about it, he might very well have felt there was little else he could say. Val suspected that he had been the kind of person who would not complain about something when it could make no difference; and he certainly wanted his two long-dead comrades remembered as much as possible—not realizing that his book was so much greater a memorial to them than any objects in museums, that it would end up inspiring many people every year to return to Cape Crozier itself. And yet find there at the site only the emptied rock shell.

  George Tremont had at some point come to feel that this removal of gear from the site had been a grave mistake. George was a Kiwi, and during a season’s film work at Scott Base, which included a few visits to Cape Crozier, he had become convinced that all the objects taken from the site—“looted,” he would say privately after a few glasses of warm Drambers, “vandalized; plundered”—ought to be returned and replaced. In other places around the globe one had these kind of inspired ideas in the bar and then sobered up the next day and dismissed them. But there was something about Antarctica that fueled obsessions, that created all manner of idées fixes which then took over whole careers and lives. The ice blink, some called it. Roger Swan, for instance, sitting in a college movie theater watching Scott of the Antarctic, had thereafter devoted his life to repeating Scott’s journey, an unlikely enough reaction one would have thought to a tale of continuous grim suffering; but the idea had obsessed him, and the Footsteps movement had been born.

  And George had become the same way about the Cape Crozier artifacts. He had labored for ten years to argue all the relevant authorities over to his side—ten full years, like a bureaucratic Iliad and Odyssey combined, involving New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust (which George had joined and become president of before announcing his plan), the Historic Sites Management Committee of the Ross Dependency Research Committee, the New Zealand Antarctic Society, the Antarctic Treaty committee concerned with historic sites, the UN’s World Heritage Site committee, and scores of other societies, government agencies, university departments, and museum boards all over the world. The agreement of the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch had been the critical battle won, as they were in possession of the majority of the artifacts; this agreement had taken the advocacy of the Prince of Wales himself, but after that convincing everyone else had become progressively easier, as there grew more and more muscle to bring to bear on any little Kiwi museum that did not want to part with its relic of the holy crusade. Even Sir Edmund Hillary had eventually written a letter in support of the idea of returning the objects to the site, turning out to be as agreeable as Cherry-Garrard had been earlier. So in the end George had gotten all of the items donated back, and had also gotten permission to build a small wooden shelter to hold them, located nearby (“but out of photo range,” Elliot noted), and modeled on the old meteorological instrument shelter standing on Windvane Hill over the Cape Evans hut, on the other side of the island.

  The new shelter had been built in Christchurch and then disassembled for transport to the site, so now, even in the cold and dark and wind, it only took a few hours to reassemble it. When it was finished, and its footing securely anchored by piles of stones similar to the piles in the rock oval itself, the happy group tromped back down to camp, and began hauling up the sledges full of the old items.

  Val helped pull these sledges up the slope, feeling peculiar as she did so. All these items had been pulled up this very ridge by the three men who had first come here; then they had been hauled away by Hillary, the first man to climb Everest, a half century later. Now up they went again, with Elliot and Geena and several other camera operators recording every step, and Arnold and George and Ann-Marie all shouting frantically for various angles and so on. That part was awful, really. But something about the feel of the load, tugging hard at her harness … Then one of the people hauling slipped, and for a second it looked like the lead sledge might slide back down and hit the following one. George and Arnold and several others (especially the people hauling the second sledge) shrieked in panic. Ridiculous, really. Still, there was something about it…. They looked like pilgrims. Perhaps, Val thought, there was always something ridiculous about a pilgrimage, something self-conscious and theatrical. Maybe that didn’t matter.

  Eventually they got all the holy relics safely on the ridge. George and his assistants went to work installing the pieces in the display shelter. The shelter did indeed look like a larger version of the wooden box on Windvane Hill, and when the items were installed, glass would protect them. A fair number of visitors would then get to see these things here at the site; not as many as would have seen them in the Kiwi museums, true, but it would mean more to those who did see them. So George had argued, for ten long years, and now Val could see his point. And in the boom market of wilderness adventure travel, re-enacting the trip called the Worst Journey in the World was always going to be popular. So a fair number of people would see this in the long run.

  When they were done Val walked over with the rest to have a look. It was a nice display. Most of the items had been left unlabelled, as they were self-explanatory. The spindly wooden sledge they had left on the rock hut, stripped to the grain and bleached by its first stay out here, was now placed next to the shelter in a kind of cradle of rock. Then under the roof and behind the glass of the shelter itself, were a pick-axe, a blubber stove, a tin of salt, a hurricane lamp with a spare glass, a tea towel, a canvas bag, a thermos flask, several little corked bottles of chemicals, a bulb atomizer, a magnifying glass, several microscope slides, seven thermometers (three Fahrenheit, one Celsius, one minimum reading, two oral); a lead weight on a string, five eye droppers, a pair of tweezers, thirty-five sample tubes, all corked; a skewer, a bottle of alcohol, two enamel dishes, four pencils, a glass syringe, four envelopes with “TERRA NOVA” printed on them; six plain envelopes, some perforated stickers, three rolls of Kodak film marked “TO BE DEVELOPED BEFORE MAY 1ST, 1911,” two tubes of magnesium powder for an Agfa camera flash; and then, along with the letters from Cherry-Garrard and Hillary concerning the disposition of the artifacts, reproductions of the two photographs that had been taken of the three explorers by Herbert Ponting, one before they took off, and the famous one after they got back, in which they were sitting at the big table inside the Cape Evans hut. Lastly, in George’s finest coup of all, they had the shells of the three penguin eggs that Cherry-Garrard had donated to the uncaring keepers at the South Kensington Museum of Natural History in England; George had tracked them down in a specimen drawer in Edinburgh University, and now they were in the display too.

  The camera pros were checking out the old film and flash powder, oohing and aahing. It certainly did seem that these objects served to make the t
hree travelers more real to the imagination. There was so much of it—and this was just the stuff they had left behind!

  “They sure traveled heavy, didn’t they?”

  “Wilson was interested in a lot of things.”

  “And back when there was such a thing as amateur science.”

  “Hey, unpack your bag and tack it up and it’d look just like this.”

  “I don’t know—a tea towel? Seven thermometers? A chemistry set?”

  George was now wandering around the ridge, looking at the new structure from all the angles he could. Mercifully the wind had died for the moment, so that people could pull up their ski masks. Val saw that George was stuffed with a contentment beyond happiness; serious, as in the midst of a religious ritual. This was his moment, and it had actually come off. Elliot and some other camerapeople were still filming, but everyone had forgotten them. As George passed by, Arnold said, “It’s beautiful, George! It’s a great idea! The people who make it here will really appreciate this.”

  The little smile on George’s face was angelic.

  Then he was busy organizing the start of the dedication ceremony he had worked up. While they did that, Val took a closer look at the two photos of the three explorers. After they had survived the hurricane on this ridge, and were given back their lives by the miraculous recovery of their tent, their struggle home had been a nightmare beyond anything a Footsteps expedition could reproduce, thank God. But they had made it back. And Ponting had taken this photo within an hour of their return, after they had cut their frozen outer clothing off of them and thawed them a bit over the stove. Wilson looked straight out at posterity, grim, shattered, knowing full well that he had escaped leading his friends to death by sheer luck alone. That he would just months later walk south with Scott to the Pole was amazing.

  Cherry-Garrard also looked into the camera. He had suffered from depression much of the rest of his life, and in this photo he appeared crazed already, driven out of his mind by the extremities of the journey. Although possibly that was just his near-sightedness. But no; such naked looks, from both him and Wilson; that was not just astigmatism. Ponting had caught their souls on film, caught their souls in the act of slipping back into their bodies, abashed at having taken off prematurely for the afterworld.