Antarctica Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 promisedto 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 firstblown their tent away, and then blown the canvas roof off their shelter; after that they had lain in their sleeping bags in a thickening drift of snow for two days, the temperatures in the minus 50s, the wind-chill factor beyond imagining—singing hymns in the