KEY POINTS:
Outside in the dark, the cold will freeze tears on your cheeks, turn your fingers black, harden your clothes into bread-boards.
Inside these wooden walls, the air is warm, the acetylene lamps blaze, there's a cloud of cocoa-laden milky steam, puffing up from the stove. Men are talking, whistling. Someone snores in his bunk. The shelves are lined with tins of food; Moir's Minced Steak, Aberdeen Marrow Fat, Bird's Egg Powder.
A century later, the men are gone, but their traces remain. The shelves are still stacked with tins. Rowntree's Elect Cocoa, announces one bluntly, in the frill-free advertising language of Edwardian England. Spratt's Wholemeal Biscuits. Tripe and Onions. The labels are peeling a little from Mutton Cutlets and Boiled Fowl.
Above the stove, enamel teacups hang from their nails, neat in a row. On the wall over Captain Scott's pillow, a worn pair of boots hang by their laces. Endless pairs of woollen socks, lie folded on mattresses.
This is the human softness of the great age of Antarctic heroism. The simple huts of the great explorers, preserved in the ice, explain how - why - this icy continent was explored; how it was possible for homo erectus, with his tender fingers and delicate eyelashes, to survive all this wind and snow and savage cold.
For it was here, inside these little sanctuaries, that the hard men warmed up frostbitten ears and thawed out ice-stiff gloves. Because of the huts, exploring the Antarctic was not just horror and hardship.
Standing in these huts this week, I understand for the first time what drove men like Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton to risk and endure so much; the collective thrill of an adventure with friends.
In the weak sunlight filtering through the windows, New Zealander Nigel Watson is standing by Scott's dinner table, holding a heavy yellow torch. "This is the only place in the world where we can actually see the first dwellings made by human beings," he says, "and we must not lose them."
Watson, the chief executive of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust, is leading fundraising and conservation efforts. New Zealand's slice of Antarctica, the Ross Dependency, includes four historic huts - Ernest Shackleton's at Cape Royds (1908), Robert Scott's at Cape Evans (1911), the 1902 Discovery Hut, also built for a Scott expedition, and a 1900 structure at Cape Adare, the first building on the continent.
After the explorers left, the huts lay idle until the early 1960s, when scientists and researchers began coming to work at the newly established United States and New Zealand bases nearby.
Snow had whirled in through tiny holes in the walls, but otherwise the huts were perfect time capsules. Dust is not a problem down here, but human nature is, and for the next few decades many artefacts were pilfered.
Finally by 2005 the Trust, with New Zealand Government support and donations from private philanthropists like the US Getty Foundation, had raised enough money to start a $7 million restoration of Shackleton's hut at Cape Royds. That task is nearly complete and the conservators are ready to move on to save Scott's hut at Cape Evans from salt corrosion and the build-up of snow and ice, but money is running out. The Scott hut will cost $9 million, and the Trust is pleading for help from the British Government and corporate sector.
They now have some heavyweight support. On Sunday, Edmund Hillary and Helen Clark visited the huts and both slated the Blair Government's inaction. "They [Britain] seem to completely ignore huts like this," Hillary said. "I can't understand it, personally ... I've always enjoyed the British heroes I read about when I was young boy, but to find now that these relics of a heroic age are barely supported by Britain is just a little bit disappointing."
The New Zealand Government could pay if it wanted to - but Clark, Hillary and the Trust all want to hammer home the point that these explorers were British and therefore London has a duty to help.
The British Government has given a little money over the years through the British arm of the Trust - approximately £100,000 ($282,000) - but says the huts are too remote and too expensive to fund any further.
The Minister of State for the Foreign Office, Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean, says while she agrees Scott and Shackleton were national heroes, the overall bill for restoration is £10 million (although, as the Tories have pointed out, Britain is only being asked for £3 million of that).
"It would be a good thing," Symons said in Question Time in 2004, the most comprehensive explanation of Britain's stance to date, "if these huts were saved. However, it has to be done at a cost that is reasonable and ... [we] must remember that, I think in the last year for which we have figures, there were only 13,000 visitors to the [Antarctic] region as a whole."
She is right - tourism in Antarctica is forbiddingly expensive (more than $20,000 for most cruise packages), which limits hut numbers to around 500 a year. The conservators would love more tourists - but should we spend on relics only seen by an elite few?
"I guess the same thing could be said about the gorillas of Uganda," says New Zealand businessman Rob Fenwick, who spent 10 years campaigning as chair of the Trust. "Most people will never see them, but they still like to know they're being protected. Most people enjoy the experience of heritage vicariously, whether it's through the web or magazines or television - so I just don't think that argument stands up."
Historic buildings on British territory must be the first priority, said Culture secretary Tessa Jowell and the National Heritage Memorial Fund in rejecting the Trust's appeals. "We have never before provided funding outside [Britain's] geographical boundaries," said Stephen Johnson, head of the memorial fund - that is, the fund could help, but isn't going to.
Some private British benefactors have come forward, but the Trust is now approaching the companies whose products are in the huts, such as Shell Oil (which has said no), Colman's Mustard, Huntley & Palmers biscuits and Fry Chocolate (now part of Cadbury Schweppes.)
"We can't understand why they're not more enthusiastic, because in a modern age of sponsorship which has tended towards environmental and heritage matters, our project would be tailor-made for them," says East, who has also raised the topic with billionaire adventurer Richard Branson, who claims to be related to Scott.
Government lobbying is continuing with the help of the Trust's London representative Martin Williams, former British High Commissioner to New Zealand, and the present High Commissioner George Fergusson (who is a member of the Trust) has expressed his support for the cause.
Tony Blair and Jack Straw have both said they will look into the matter, and there are some encouraging signs from junior Government figures like Culture Minister David Lammy - and the Conservative manifesto for the 2005 election included a commitment to preserve the huts, "a major breakthrough," says Paul East, Trust chairman.
The Royal Society, Royal Geographic Society, Museum of Natural History and naturalists Ranulph Fiennes and David Attenborough are all vocal supporters, so with the addition of Hillary and Clark's urging, the Trust is confident that somehow, it will get the money.
"Whatever happens now as a result of the growing interest, in one way or another these huts aren't going to fall over," says Rob Fenwick. "It's not as if we haven't tried in Westminster, and they've been pretty obdurate in their resistance - and I think New Zealand will rise to the challenge if we have to."
Great Scott, Greater Shackleton
Down on the ice, you have to choose: Scott or Shackleton?
The great explorers still loom large in the Antarctic community and everyone working on the continent - scientists, mechanics, medics, rescue personnel, cooks - can debate their feats and methods. Was Scott a foolhardy snob, obsessed with Naval hierarchy, or a misunderstood visionary? What made Shackleton's men follow him so unquestioningly? Did so many have to die on Scott's vain attempt to be first to the Pole? Was their food adequate? Should they have made more use of sled-dogs, as the Norwegian Roald Amundsen so famously did in his Pole conquest?
For the New Zealanders at Scott Base, the overwhelming favourite is Shackleton, the free-spirited merchant seaman who risked his own life again and again to save his stranded men, ignoring Scott's attempts to claim Antarctica as his own domain. "I'm a slightly irresponsible Shackleton type," said Sir Edmund Hillary with glee this week, sentiments echoed by nearly everyone on the base. "I'm a Shackleton man," says Antarctica New Zealand chief executive Lou Sanson. "Everyone in his team was an equal. Just looking around his hut, you can see he really had it going on."
Inside the huts, it's easy to conjure up those first explorers. Here in Scott's hut is the bunk of Captain Oates, who walked into a blizzard to give his comrades a chance for survival on Scott's final, fatal Pole dash. This is where Aspley Cherry-Garrard lay, his face black from exposure, after a mad midwinter journey to collect penguin eggs - allowed, some say recklessly, by Scott.
On the floor in Shackleton's hut is the metal hoop-frame which was placed over poor Philip Brocklehurst's frostbitten foot after toe-amputation surgery, to lift the blankets off his wounds.
In the Scott hut, everything was segregated - one latrine for officers, another for ordinary men. Only the "gentlemen" could sit at the dining table. While everyone else squashed together, Scott enjoyed a private office and large desk, on which a mummified penguin lies, as if ready for dissection.
Around at the Cape Royds hut, Shackleton's only private space was a tiny cubicle, which he gave up to the ailing Brocklehurst.
"This is the lesson of these huts," says restoration programme manager Al Fastier, a bearded 47-year-old New Zealander. "They're a really good example that through good leadership and endurance you can do almost anything really. Shackleton was a man who would get up in the morning and make the team a cup of tea. He gave up his cubicle for Brocklehurst. It was compassionate leadership, and today that's a very important lesson - more so than ever."
