Antarctica

Athanasios (Athos) Roussos's great passion since his student days at Cambridge University, Antarctica is the "azimuth" that sets his and ward Jakob Beer's lives together in Greece and in Canada. Athos most admires scientist Edward Wilson, who accompanies Captain Scott at Cape Evans. Both are watercolorists who capture the beauty. Starving, the explorers hallucinate about food and suffer food nightmares and take turns lecturing about their various specialties. Athos tells young Jakob tales of the expedition at night as they gather around a lantern, as the doomed explorers had gathered. He notes that the five weary, frostbitten men who reach the South Pole discover Amundsen's flag. Wilson collects fossil evidence that Antarctica had once been part of a super continent that fractures and, in part, slowly creates the Himalayas. They perish, trying to carry this information back.

After World War I, Athos returns to Cambridge to see...