A memoir of extraordinary depth and searing honesty, In the Ghost Country is the story of Peter Hillary's physical and emotional journey across the icy wastes of Antarctica. A place where the thoughts and memories of a lifetime were called forth

John E. Elder is a senior writer for The Sunday Age newspaper in Melbourne.

The Old Route
The Rope
The Hillary Step
Mother's Locket
Acknowledgments
References
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Chapter One Keep a careful watch for the missing party -- they may be anywhere on route. Watch out for tracks leading away from the route. Mark the route taken and leave evidence of passing with flags, cairns etc. and notes left in obvious locations indicating your intentions and time of passage. The lost party might miss you by hours or even minutes, or pass by in poor visibility.From a government manual for Antarctic operations Captain Scott was an absentee, officially buried at sea. In the lore he's still hauling, following the calling, and that's how he remains, famously. He's still out there, and that was something Peter Scott always knew for sure. Captain Scott never got to see how his baby son turned out, and he turned out fine, Sir Peter, by all accounts a decent and kindly gent. Captain Robert Scott never knew a conversation with the boy or the man, and his son had to make do with the history books and the legend and what the family told him and what everybody else had to say about him. Later there were terrible things said about "the Captain," as his men had called him, and worse when the son was an old man, twice as old as his father when the Captain lay down in his sleeping bag for the last time.A year after, a search party found his father in his sleeping bag and later some of them talked to Peter Scott. Some of them visited the family home when he was still small, and he picked up a few new things about his father with the visits and the talks, but he'd read the party's story by the time any of them really talked about it.The party that found him a year after, they found him with two others only, and not the five that had gone to the South Pole, because two had already died. The first one was buried deep south, on the glacier, and the other one not buried by his fellows, because he'd walked out just a few days south of where everything finally stopped, and the three remaining had no enthusiasm for anything but a quick look around, no great sense of purpose in doing anything but leaving their man wherever he'd taken himself to be buried by the drift that buried everything that lay down, and so just the three found side by side in the tent that had to be dug out of the drift.The men in the party went in one by one before the tent was collapsed over the dead, and the living said their prayers as the drift pasted the tent and turned it white again. It goes that none of them ever said out loud how Scott and the others looked at the end of it, and at least one man later lost his mind from the burden of seeing it: the color of the freeze dried faces, the matchstick mummified arms, the long unfelt agonies of scurvy and starvation and fear and flesh frozen, and frozen rotting inside and out, and all that had twisted their spines and their features for a long time, and that's how they'd remained.There was no "they looked so peaceful," there was no bringing them home, no flag wrapped coffin for the Captain. He's still out there. That's why they call him "Scott of the Antarctic," surely. Because he's still out there.It's less well remembered as folklore that the Captain's rival Roald Amundsen also died in his adventure clothes, that he was still out there, at the opposite end of the world from Scott's remains, under the ice in the Arctic, probably still sitting in the plane that went down at a point vaguely known while searching for a missing explorer who was eventually rescued by other people, disappearing June eighteen, nineteen twenty-eight. He was fifty-six years old. It was a marvelous story that lingered more as a fabled postscript because it was at odds with the core of his legend, his place in things, in part because many people believed Amundsen would find his way home, because he always made it home from the worst places with such predictability that he had ceased to amaze.He knew it. His place in things was already fixed in