Antarctica Read Online Free Page A

like a knee-high rock circle, and so did the black patches too.
    So hither and yon Val’s clients wandered, calling out to each other at every pile of stone or snow. Several were trying to read their copies of
The Worst Journey in the World
by flashlight, to see if the text could direct them. Val heard some complaining about the vagueness of Cherry-Garrard’s descriptions, which was not very generous given that young Cherry had been terribly near-sighted and had not been able to wear his thick glasses because they kept frosting up, so that among the other remarkable aspects of the Worst Journey was the fact that one of the three travelers, and the one who ended up telling their tale, had been functionally blind. A kind of Homer and Ishmael both.
    Val sat on a waist-high rock next to a couple of the film crew, who had given up filming for the moment and were plugging their gloves into a battery heater and then clasping chocolate bars in the hope of thawing them a bit before eating. They were laughing at George, who was now consulting a copy of Sir Edmund Hillary’s book
No Latitude for Error
, which recounted the first discovery of the rock hut, forty-six years after it had been built. Hillary and his companions had been out testing the modified farm tractors they would later drive up Skelton Glacier to the South Pole, and once at Cape Crozier they had wandered around like Val’s companions were now, with their own copy of Cherry-Garrard’s book and nothing more; essentially theirs hadbeen the experience Val’s companions were now trying to reproduce, for at that time Cherry-Garrard’s description of the site was the only guide anyone could have, with no GPS or anything else to help. So Hillary and his companions had argued over Cherry’s book line by line, just like Val’s group was doing now, only in genuine rather than faked frustration, until Hillary himself had located the hut.
    His book’s account of the discovery, however, also proved to have a certain vagueness to it, as if the canny mountaineer had not wanted to reveal an exact route. Although he had said, as George was proclaiming now, that the hut was right on the line of the ridge, and in a saddle. “‘As
windy
and
inhospitable
a location as could be
imagined!’”
George read in an angry shout.
    “We should be filming this,” Geena noted.
    “Elka’s getting it,” Elliot said calmly.
    Sir Edmund was proving as little help as Cherry-Garrard. It occurred to Val that someone could also look up the relevant passages in Mear and Swan’s
In the Footsteps of Scott
, for those first re-enacters, the unknowing instigators of an entire genre of adventure travel, had also relocated the hut in the pre-GPS era, and had published a good photo of it in their book. But it was a coffee-table book, Val recalled, and probably no one had wanted to carry the weight. Anyway no book was going to help them on this dark wild ridge.
    Elliot echoed her thought: “A classic case of the map not being the territory.”
    “Although a map would help. I don’t think they’re gonna find it without GPS.”
    “Has to be here somewhere. They’ll trip over it eventually.”
    “It’s too dark now.”
    And the wind was beginning to hurt. People werebeginning to crab around with their backs to the wind no matter which way they were going. It was loud, too, the wind moaning and keening dramatically over the broken rock.
    “I’ll give you even odds they find it.”
    “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