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listening. If anyone climbed the hill, I hid in a sea chest, a box with a high curved lid; and each time less of me emerged.
    We relied on one merchant, Old Martin, for supplies and news. He had known Athos’s father, and Athos since he was a child. Old Martin’s son, Ioannis, had a Jewish wife. One night, he and Allegra and their little son appeared at our door, their arms full of their belongings. We hid Avramakis—Match, for short—in a drawer. While German soldiers stretched out their legs under the tables of the Zakynthos Hotel.

    Because Athos’s love was paleobotany, because his heroes were rock and wood as well as human, I learned not only the history of men but the history of earth. I learned the power we give to stones to hold human time. The stone tablets of the Commandments. Cairns, the ruins of temples. Gravestones, standing stones, the Rosetta, Stonehenge, the Parthenon. (The blocks cut and carried by inmates in the limestone quarries at Golleschau. The tombstones smashed in Hebrew cemeteries and plundered for Polish sidewalks; today bored citizens, staring at their feet while waiting for a bus, can still read the inscriptions.)
    As a young man, Athos marvelled at the invention of the Geiger counter, and I remember him explaining to me, shortly after the end of the war, cosmic rays and Libby’s new method of carbon dating. “It’s the moment of death we measure from.”
    Athos had a special affection for limestone—that crushed reef of memory, that living stone, organic history squeezed into massive mountain tombs. As a student, he wrote a paper on the karst fields of Yugoslavia. Limestone that develops slowly under pressure into marble—Athos describing the process made it sound like a spiritual journey. He was rhapsodic about the French Causses and the Pennines in Britain; about “Strata” Smith and Abraham Werner, who, he said, like surgeons “folded back the skin of time” while surveying canals and mines.
    When Athos was seven, his father brought him home fossils from Lyme Regis. When he was twenty-five, he was entranced by Europe’s new sweetheart, a limestone fertility goddess that had risen from the earth fully formed, the “Willendorf Venus.”
    But it was Athos’s fascination with Antarctica, which began when he was a student at Cambridge, that was to become our azimuth. It was to direct the course of our lives.
    Athos admired the scientist Edward Wilson, who was with Captain Scott at the South Pole. Among other things, Wilson, like Athos, was a watercolourist. His pigments — the deep-purple ice, the lime-green midnight sky, white stratus over black lava—were not only beautiful but scientifically accurate. His paintings of atmospheric phenomena—parhelions, paraselenae, lunar haloes—depicted the exact degrees of the sun. Athos relished that Wilson made watercolour sketches in the most perilous circumstances, then at night read the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and poetry in the tent. I was intrigued to know Wilson tried his own hand at writing the occasional poem— an activity, Wilson noted modestly, “that is perhaps an early symptom of polar anaemia.”
    Always hungry ourselves, we commiserated with the starving explorers. In their howling tent, the exhausted men ate hallucinatory meals. They smelled roast beef in the frozen darkness and savoured each bite in their imaginations as they swallowed their dried rations. At night, rigid in their sleeping bags, they discussed chocolate. Silas Wright, the only Canadian on the expedition, dreamed of apples. Athos read me Cherry-Garrard’s account of their food nightmares: shouting at deaf waiters; sitting at laden tables with their arms tied; the plate that falls to the floor the moment it’s served. Finally, just as they taste their first mouthful, they fall into a crevasse.
    At their base at Cape Evans during the long winter night, each member of the expedition gave a lecture on his particular specialty: polar sea-life, coronas,