Restoration - Terra Incognita - page 200

a wall of wooden boxes stencilled with brand names extended between the officers and the men;
originally this wall stretched right across the hut, broken only by a narrow gap for traffic, but it
had been demolished by the members of the Ross Sea party who camped in the hut. Presumably
they were desperate to find anything still languishing in the boxes. Now, except for Ponting's dark-
room, which was next to Scott's cubby-hole and directly opposite the entrance at the other end,
the rest of the living area consisted of one large open space. It was about fifty feet by twenty-five,
and narrow bunks were positioned around the edge while the middle was occupied by a long table
and, at Scott's end, a black metal coal stove. The corner on the right at the far end, opposite Scott,
functioned as a laboratory for the expedition scientists, and in it three or four benches and tables
were piled with a plethora of vials and test tubes. The kitchen, still overflowing with supplies, was
at the other end, on the right near the door, and here they had installed another stove.
Scott's den was about eight feet by six, and besides the bunk and a few bookshelves on the par-
tition walls it contained only his desk. Two other bunks were also tucked away in there, a few feet
from Scott's on the other side of the desk and underneath the medicine shelves. These were occu-
pied by Bill Wilson, the chief scientist, and Lieutenant Teddy Evans, who went home with scurvy
and returned in command of the Terra Nova . So Scott had never really been alone - at least out-
wardly.
At the foot of Scott's bunk the light revealed a hot-water bottle we had not seen before. We felt
as if we were massaging the hut back to life. It never heated up though. It was colder inside than
out, like a reverse greenhouse.
They had been very happy in the hut, as we had been in ours. Who wouldn't have been, in that
place? This is what Cherry wrote about its position. He began by saying that he had seen a lot of
volcanoes.
But give me Erebus for my friend. Whoever made Erebus knew all the charm of horizontal lines,
and the lines of Erebus are for the most part nearer the horizontal than the vertical. And so he is
the most restful mountain in the world, and I was glad when I knew that our hut would lie at his
feet. And always there floated from his crater the lazy banner of his cloud of steam.
Lucia had decided to paint the freshly illuminated bunk, and positioned her stool so that it faced
the hot-water bottled. When I shone my torch into the corner behind her, the beam lit up a small
brown glass bottle on a shelf full of medicines. A neat, printed label announced simply ' Poison ',
and near the base of the bottle another label read ' Harrods '.
'Isn't that a store for fancy people?' Lucia asked, following the beam of the torch. Oh God, I
thought, here we go again. I nipped sharply into Ponting's darkroom.
'Look at this!' I called. Lucia came in. 'It's a glass negative - it shows a man having his hair cut
here in the hut!' The image was fogged, but there, indubitably, was a gnarly old explorer sitting
on a stool next to Scott's desk, a pipe protruding from his mouth at a jaunty angle and a pair of
scissors held to his already cropped scalp by another man. Both were wearing baggy trousers. I
had an idea.