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their collective squawking. The newest generation ofEmperors were still little furballs, in great danger of being snatched by skuas wheeling overhead, the skuas trying some test dives and then skating back on the hard wind to the Adelie penguin rookery at the north end of the cape. As always, Cape Crozier was windy.
    Val’s clients finished their photography, and then were not inclined to stay and observe the Emperors any longer; the wind was too biting. Even dressed in what Arnold called spacesuits, a wind like this one cut into you. So they quickly regathered around Val. George told her they were hoping that they would still have time in the brief twilight to climb Igloo Spur and look for the circle of rocks that Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard had left behind.
    “Sure,” Val said, and led them to the usual campsite at the foot of Igloo Spur, and told them to go on up and have a look while there was still some twilight left. She would set a security tent and then follow. George Tremont, the leader of the expedition, which was not just another Footsteps re-enactment but a special affair, went into conference with Arnold, his producer, and the cinematographer and camera crew. They had to decide if they should film this moment as the true live hunt for the rock circle, or else find it today and then film a hunt tomorrow, in a little re-enactment of their own.
    Val had very little patience for this kind of thing. Her GPS had the coordinates for the “Wilson Rock Hut,” as the Kiwi maps called it, and so they could have hiked up the spur and found the thing immediately. But no; this was not to be done. George and the rest wanted to film a finding of the rock igloo without mechanical aid. They seemed to assume that their telecast’s audience would be so ignorant that they would not immediately wonder why GPS was not being used. Val doubted thisnotion, but kept her thoughts to herself, and concentrated on setting up one of the big team tents, looking up once or twice at the gang tramping up the ridge, with their cameras but without GPS. It was pure theater.
    After she had the tent up, and the sledges securely anchored, she hiked up the spine of the lava ridge. About five hundred feet over the sea ice the ridge leveled off, and fell and rose a few times before joining the massive flank of Mount Terror, Erebus’s little brother. As she had expected, she found her group still hunting for the rock hut, scattered everywhere over the ridge. In the dim tail end of the twilight this kind of wandering around could be dangerous; Cape Crozier was big and complicated, its multiple lava ridges separating lots of tilted and crevassed ice slopes running down onto the sea ice. When Mear and Swan had re-enacted the Worst Journey for the first time, in 1986, they had lost their own tent in the darkness for a matter of some hours, and if they hadn’t stumbled across it again they would have died.
    But now the wandering had to be allowed; this was the good stuff, the treasure hunt. The camera operators were hopping around trying to stay out of each other’s views, getting every moment of it on their supersensitive film; it would be more visible on screen than it was to the naked eye. And everyone had a personal GPS beeper in their parka anyway, so if someone did disappear, Val could pull out the finder unit and track them down. So it was safe enough.
    The searchers, however, were beginning to look like a troop of mimes doing impressions of Cold Discouragement. The truth was that the rock igloo that the three explorers had left behind was only knee high at its highest point, and both it and the plaque put there bythe Kiwis had been buried in the last decade’s heavy snowfalls; though most of the snow here had been swept to sea by the winds, enough had adhered in the black rubble to make the whole ridge a dense stippling of black and white, hard to read in the growing darkness. Every large white patch on the broad ridge looked more or less