. p. 573.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE POLAR JOURNEY (_continued_)

This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall, ...
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, ...
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land.
SHAKESPEARE.

VI. FARTHEST SOUTH

Stevenson has written of a traveller whose wife slumbered by his side
what time his spirit re-adventured forth in memory of days gone by. He
was quite happy about it, and I suppose his travels had been peaceful,
for days and nights such as these men spent coming down the Beardmore
will give you nightmare after nightmare, and wake you shrieking--years
after.

Of course they were shaken and weakened. But the conditions they had
faced, and the time they had been out, do not in my opinion account
entirely for their weakness nor for Evans' collapse, which may have had
something to do with the fact that he was the biggest, heaviest and most
muscular man in the party. I do not believe that this is a life for such
men, who are expected to pull their weight and to support and drive a
larger machine than their companions, and at the same time to eat no
extra food. If, as seems likely, the ration these men were eating was not
enough to support the work they were doing, then it is clear that the
heaviest man will feel the deficiency sooner and more severely than
others who are smaller than he. Evans must have had a most terrible time:
I think it is clear from the diaries that he had suffered very greatly
without complaint. At home he would have been nursed in bed: here he must
march (he was pulling the day he died) until he was crawling on his
frost-bitten hands and knees in the snow--horrible: most horrible perhaps
for those who found him so, and sat in the tent and watched him die. I am
told that simple concussion does not kill as suddenly as this: probably
some clot had moved in his brain.

For one reason and another they took very nearly as long to come down the
glacier with a featherweight sledge as we had taken to go up it with full
loads. Seven days' food were allowed from the Upper to the Lower Glacier
Depot. Bowers told me that he thought this was running it fine. But the
two supporting parties got through all right, though they both tumbled
into the hor