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of the holy crusade. Even Sir Edmund Hillary had eventually written a letter in support of the idea of returning the objects to the site, turning out to be as agreeable as Cherry-Garrard had been earlier. So in the end George had gotten all of the items donated back, and had also gotten permission to build a small wooden shelter to hold them, located nearby (“but out of photo range,” Elliot noted), and modeled on the old meteorological instrument shelter standing on Windvane Hill over the Cape Evans hut, on the other side of the island.
    The new shelter had been built in Christchurch and then disassembled for transport to the site, so now, even in the cold and dark and wind, it only took a few hours to reassemble it. When it was finished, and its footing securely anchored by piles of stones similar to the piles in the rock oval itself, the happy group tromped back down to camp, and began hauling up the sledges full of the old items.
    Val helped pull these sledges up the slope, feeling peculiar as she did so. All these items had been pulled up this very ridge by the three men who had first come here; then they had been hauled away by Hillary, the first man to climb Everest, a half century later. Now up they went again, with Elliot and Geena and several other camera operators recording every step, and Arnoldand George and Ann-Marie all shouting frantically for various angles and so on. That part was awful, really. But something about the feel of the load, tugging hard at her harness … Then one of the people hauling slipped, and for a second it looked like the lead sledge might slide back down and hit the following one. George and Arnold and several others (especially the people hauling the second sledge) shrieked in panic. Ridiculous, really. Still, there was something about it…. They looked like pilgrims. Perhaps, Val thought, there was always something ridiculous about a pilgrimage, something self-conscious and theatrical. Maybe that didn’t matter.
    Eventually they got all the holy relics safely on the ridge. George and his assistants went to work installing the pieces in the display shelter. The shelter did indeed look like a larger version of the wooden box on Windvane Hill, and when the items were installed, glass would protect them. A fair number of visitors would then get to see these things here at the site; not as many as would have seen them in the Kiwi museums, true, but it would mean more to those who did see them. So George had argued, for ten long years, and now Val could see his point. And in the boom market of wilderness adventure travel, re-enacting the trip called the Worst Journey in the World was always going to be popular. So a fair number of people would see this in the long run.
    When they were done Val walked over with the rest to have a look. It was a nice display. Most of the items had been left unlabelled, as they were self-explanatory. The spindly wooden sledge they had left on the rock hut, stripped to the grain and bleached by its first stay out here, was now placed next to the shelter in a kind of cradle of rock. Then under the roof and behind theglass of the shelter itself, were a pick-axe, a blubber stove, a tin of salt, a hurricane lamp with a spare glass, a tea towel, a canvas bag, a thermos flask, several little corked bottles of chemicals, a bulb atomizer, a magnifying glass, several microscope slides, seven thermometers (three Fahrenheit, one Celsius, one minimum reading, two oral); a lead weight on a string, five eye droppers, a pair of tweezers, thirty-five sample tubes, all corked; a skewer, a bottle of alcohol, two enamel dishes, four pencils, a glass syringe, four envelopes with “ TERRA NOVA ” printed on them; six plain envelopes, some perforated stickers, three rolls of Kodak film marked “ TO BE DEVELOPED BEFORE MAY 1ST, 1911 ,” two tubes of magnesium powder for an Agfa camera flash; and then, along with the letters from Cherry-Garrard and Hillary concerning the