Free A Victim of the Aurora by Thomas Keneally Page B

emotionally possible. Now that this has happened I am tempted … merely tempted … to revise my ideas.’
    Alec continued, as if on a cue, to whip up an outline, an acceptable silhouette.
    â€˜Even after the Leader had given the phenomenon that name, PO Percy Mulroy claimed to have seen a man walking across the lower slopes of Erebus. It was from a distance of at least a mile and the weather was deteriorating, but Percy certainly believed – and believes still – in the man’s reality.’ Alec began hammering the palm of his hand gently with his own pipe bowl. For a second, he bit his lower lip. ‘I saw the man too. It was just like the time Harry Kittery saw him. We were at the Adelie penguin rookery half a mile down the coast. I had Paul Gabriel with me and PO Bertram Wallace. Wallace was catching the birds – he has a gift for it, his father was a falconer you know, not that falcons and penguins have much in common. Wallace would hold the Adelies while Paul put a numbered tag on their ankles and I took note of the number on a sheet of paper. We want to see if the numbered penguins come back to the same rookery next spring for their mating. Anyhow, I looked up while Wallace was chasing some penguin chick and the man was only a hundred yards away on a rise. I couldn’t see him in detail because the light was behind him. I could tell he’d run if I shouted, so I hissed at the other two, but by the time they looked he was gone. I … I didn’t make much of it because it’s not one of the purposes of the expedition to find Antarctic Crusoes, and in any case the light in this country does perform tricks, not subtle ones either. But that’s four of us who thought we saw a man. I think now we must have.’
    â€˜I pray,’ said Sir Eugene, priming him, ‘that you must have.’
    â€˜Of the men counted as dead on Holbrooke’s expedition, only the bodies of Forbes and Chalmers weren’t found. As you may know, Forbes and Chalmers started on a journey from Holbrooke’s hut farther down this coast for the Taylor Glacier. It’s a contracting glacier on the other side of McMurdo Sound and the valley it leaves as it contracts is dry – it doesn’t fill with snow, no one knows why. It is one of those Antarctic puzzles. Anyhow, Forbes and Chalmers began the journey in autumn. It happened that the autumn that year was one of ceaseless blizzards and Forbes and Chalmers neither returned nor were they found. Later Holbrooke was pilloried for negligence and delay, for not supplying them adequately. But they could have disappeared no matter how well they were equipped, given the weather. If, however, there is a man – other than ourselves – in McMurdo Sound, it must be Forbes or Chalmers.’
    Sir Eugene murmured, ‘The Forbes-Chalmers effect is therefore well-named.’
    I had noticed before that the relationship between Sir Eugene and Alec was a perfect king-chancellor one. Sir Eugene made the pronouncements and Alec did all the annotating. As he immediately began to do again.
    â€˜Last February some of us visited Holbrooke’s hut. I noticed two things that surprised me. For example, Holbrooke says in his journal that when the relief ship turned up in February of 1909 the expedition was down to one crate of cocoa, a hundred and twenty pounds of biscuit, ten pounds of butter, twenty-five pounds of rice, eighty pounds of pemmican. Enough to keep twenty-five men alive for ten days. He says that the members of the expedition were so delighted to see the ship that they left all the food behind as a sort of tithe to the fates that had saved them. I was surprised to find no supplies in the hut. But I found something written on the wall. It said John Forbes, Dead in Christ, 1908 . Large lettering. Done in charcoal. It … well, it didn’t look like the sort of thing Holbrooke would have wanted on his walls.’
    â€˜Too