Fugitive pieces Read Online Free PDF

parasites…. This was serious passion for knowledge; a biologist once traded a heavy pair of socks for extra geology lessons.
    Geologizing quickly became a mania, even among the non-scientists. Strongman Birdie Bowers turned into a rockhound, and every time he brought in a sample for identification he made the same announcement: “Here’s a gabbroid nodule impaled in basalt with feldspar and olivine rampant.”
    Like the lectures at Cape Evans, these tales were told by Athos in the evenings, with the lantern on the floor between us. The light animated lithographs of Carboniferous ponds and polar wastes, and glinted off the glassed-i n shelves of minerals and wood samples, the jars of chemicals. Details gradually came clear, as I learned the words. By late evening the floor would be littered with volumes open to pictures and diagrams. In that lamplight, we might have belonged to any century.
    “Imagine,” said Athos, his pale voice an emanation in the dark room, “reaching the pole only to discover Amundsen had reached it first. The entire globe hung beneath their feet. They no longer knew what they looked like, not the distant white flesh under their clothes, nor their leather faces. The sight of their own naked bodies was as far from them as England. They’d walked for months. Ceaselessly hungry. The snow turned their eyes to tinder and their faces glowed blue with frostbite. Across endless terrain split by invisible seams ready to swallow them without warning and without a sound. It was forty degrees below. They stood beside the only human evidence for a thousand miles—a mere square of cloth, Amundsen’s flag— and knew they faced every step of the homeward journey. Yet, there’s a photo of Wilson at their camp at the bottom of the world, and the camera has caught him with his head leaned back. Laughing.”
    At the head of the Beardmore Glacier, in the rare exposed surface, Wilson collected fossils from the fringe of an inland sea three million years old. These rocks later helped prove that Antarctica had been tectonically torn from an immense continent, from which Australia, India, Africa, Madagascar, and South America fractured, crumbled, strayed. India smashed into Asia, the crumpled point of collision becoming the Himalayas. All of which the earth achieved with staggering patience— a few centimetres a year.
    The men, barely able to drag themselves, continued to haul back thirty-five pounds of fossils from the Beardmore. Wearied beyond recovery, Wilson kept on recording his observations: ice that resembled, to his homesick eyes, gorse or sea-urchins. The rest of the expedition waited for the five who’d made the final march to the pole. When winter set in, they knew their companions would never return. In the spring, a search party discovered the tent. When the bodies were dug out of the snow, Scott’s arm was around Wilson, and the bag of fossils was lying next to them. They’d carried it with them to the end. This thrilled Athos, but for me, another detail proved Wilson’s nobility. Wilson had borrowed a book of Tennyson’s poetry for the final march to the pole and, even when every ounce tore at his thighs and shoulders, he persisted in carrying it back, in order to return it to its lender. I could easily imagine carrying a favoured item to the ends of the earth, if only to help me believe I’d see its beloved owner again.
    After the First World War, Athos had returned to Cambridge to visit the new Scott Polar Research Institute. Of England he recounted nothing of castles or knights. Instead he described flowstone, dripstone, and other marvellous cave formations; spasms in time. Marble curtains bulging with petrified breezes, gypsum blossoms, clusters of stone grapes, limestone flukes shining with breath. He’d brought back a small postcard of the Scott Institute, which he showed me. And hanging above his desk was an especially prized possession: a reproduction of Wilson’s “Paraselena at