The Survivor by Thomas Keneally

Jones’ toiletries counter.”
    â€œBut what happened?”
    â€œOh.” The other artistic young man chuckled. “Sick three times and scuttled her twice.”
    â€œYou did?”
    â€œNo, you did.”
    Ramsey knew the effete boy exaggerated, but there must have been some basis for the overstatement. But he was no rugged sinner, and felt merely sad.
    â€œI hope I didn’t offend her,” he said.
    The one who hadn’t recently read his Primer of Mythology guffawed.
    That afternoon Ramsey found a penitentially large treatise on the Antarctic continent. So his Antarctic engrossment began in an expiatory key. This was because he dared suspect that a loss of innocence had taken place.
    He thought of Antarctica in literary terms: a prophetic landscape begging a prophet and tailored for seekings and disillusionments of epic proportions. Yet none of the seekers had a literary style to bless themselves with, not the sort of style that counted. He was delighted with a book by Leeming: it took some small account of the gulfs between man and man.
    He would have liked to revolutionize the staid business of Antarctic writing. But behind the desire was a more basic passion to see the continent. This had him by the heart at Wednesday breakfast in his northern pub when he found the expeditionary advertisement in the previous Saturday’s Sydney newspaper.
    He lied to his headmaster and caught the Friday train. On Saturday afternoon the line he joined outside the expeditionary office in lower George Street was stretched five hundred feet along the pavement, filled the hallway and two flights of steps. Most of the men seemed old soldiers, tested and sane. Ramsey waited just the same, and reached Leeming’s office at six-thirty.
    Leeming was tired, all the planes of his thin face sunken. As if he’d placed a bet with himself about the perverse way his quest would end, he asked and accepted questions with a sort of preconceived bitterness. He gave an impression of tightly controlled but almost hysterical testiness. It was with none of the geniality of the railway carriage that he said aloud as Ramsey entered, “Well, at least we know this one’s motives aren’t base.”
    â€œIf it’s hopeless my being here.…”
    â€œNo. Hopelessness and uselessness didn’t prevent half the city milling on our doorstep this afternoon. Sit down please.”
    â€œI thought they all looked intimidating. A fine group of men. All those old soldiers.”
    â€œ Old soldiers they certainly are. The war is six years over now. The expedition sails at Christmas, you know, and most of the places in it were privately decided months ago. I ask you, what men of that age would be able to abandon their careers and sail for polar waters with two months’ notice? Only a man who has failed here one way or another and who wants a virgin continent on which to practise further fecklessness. No, I’m glad you’ve come.”
    Ramsey was disappointed that late afternoon by the aldermanic attitude Leeming had taken to the long line of applicants, and by the nasty classroom ring of “fecklessness”. That evening Leeming seemed the last man on earth to whom you would confide any plan to revolutionize Antarctic literature.
    He redeemed himself now by nodding at what seemed a long short-list on the desk. “There are exceptions among those old soldiers,” he admitted. “But a certain amount of stability is primary. And I should tell you, Alec, that unfortunately mysticism and art can go hang down there. You said you were a poet?”
    â€œBut possessing broad shoulders.”
    Yet it was found he knew no geology, no magnetism, no physics, no meteorology, nor even the necessary zoology to at least get him to the Oates Coast. He was putatively a churchgoer, and Leeming put stress on this although not himself orthodox. And he was very strong.
    â€œI’ve put you on the