The Survivor by Thomas Keneally Page A

short-list,” Leeming said in an odd voice of complaint, seeming to be cursing himself for feeling bound to do it on account of their overnight companionship on a train from the country.
    Still, no one had ever before shut Ramsey off from one of his horizons, and the éclat of an Antarctic destiny was his for two weeks. Erebus sat above his big shoulders and earned him more authority with his farmboys for less outlay of savagery. Then he received a letter of regret from Leeming. In revenge, he promised himself Bohemia and a world of more self-aware scuttling in the summer.
    October turned to the first day of languid coastal summer. A telegram came. “If still Antarctically inclined report HQ Saturday latest. Nominal pay. Clearance arranged with education department.”
    â€œAre you good with animals?” Leeming wanted to know on the Saturday. His dog-man, survivor of two expeditions, had been stricken by a disease of the heart. “He always made much of the mysterious husky, as if to keep the proud scientists in their place. Now he’s spent two years breeding huskies with cattle-dogs in the Alps beyond Cooma. We’re going to take some of his cattle-dog ad mixtures with us. He’s very sick, but won’t be invalided. I’m sure you can learn the dog trade from him in two months.…”
    Ramsey felt renewed. For you can’t cease from Calvinism simply by going secretly rationalist at the age of nineteen; you still know by bone-knowledge that abasement and labour are the only fructifiers, and you look to the large intentions of men like Leeming to give your abasement and labour their grandeur.
    At nominal pay.
    With a facility learnt at businessmen’s luncheons and fund-raising circuses Leeming drew down the bold lines of his polar ambitions. They would start with a base on the Oates Coast, if a place could be found where the rise to the Antarctic plateau was gradual. In the first three months of the new year, supplies would be carried inland, and materials for a hut so that some of the party could winter in the interior.
    â€œIt hasn’t been done before,” he explained, but to avoid appearing a mere record-breaker: “It will put the scientists in a far better position to correlate magnetic readings and to take photographs so that the height of the auroral displays can be calculated.”
    Ramsey felt reverent and said he understood.
    After the winter night one party would use the coast hut as base and go out to re-locate the shifting area of the magnetic pole. Another would survey the northern mountains of Victoria Land. A third would spend the summer supplying the inland base for the return of the further three parties who would range out from it.
    Of this second set of parties, one was to survey the central Victoria Land mountains, another to move in the totally unexplored direction of the geomagnetic pole (with some hope of reaching it), a third to act as support party to the latter.
    The demands of this schedule might well mean that they would need to spend a second winter in Antarctica.
    Ramsey’s awe burgeoned. “It must be the greatest Antarctic programme ever devised,” he murmured, feeling silly at the grandiose sentence.
    Leeming squinted at the rough map and ripped it up.
    â€œYou must get used to the idea that you and your dogs are indispensable,” he warned Ramsey. He amplified.
    They were to take four Fordson tractors that ran on kerosene, but a tractor couldn’t adapt itself to polar conditions as dogs could. People had been at him to take an aeroplane, but he thought planes were a spectacle rather than a thing of value. “It is a contest that transcends mechanics,” Leeming said; and the sentiment sounded emotively correct but, even to Ramsey, dogmatic.
    Then the leader spent time urging Ramsey to be humble with the dog-man. “He’ll resent you because you’re educated and also because you’re his