Antarctica Read Online Free Page B

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