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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 bookwas 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, andscores 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