t continually by howling
blizzards which prevent you seeing your hand before your face. Life in
such surroundings is both mentally and physically cramped; open-air
exercise is restricted and in blizzards quite impossible, and you realize
how much you lose by your inability to see the world about you when you
are out-of-doors. I am told that when confronted by a lunatic or one who
under the influence of some great grief or shock contemplates suicide,
you should take that man out-of-doors and walk him about: Nature will do
the rest. To normal people like ourselves living under abnormal
circumstances Nature could do much to lift our thoughts out of the rut of
everyday affairs, but she loses much of her healing power when she cannot
be seen, but only felt, and when that feeling is intensely uncomfortable.

Somehow in judging polar life you must discount compulsory endurance; and
find out what a man can shirk, remembering always that it is a sledging
life which is the hardest test. It is because it is so much easier to
shirk in civilization that it is difficult to get a standard of what your
average man can do. It does not really matter much whether your man
whose work lies in or round the hut shirks a bit or not, just as it does
not matter much in civilization: it is just rather a waste of
opportunity. But there's precious little shirking in Barrier sledging: a
week finds most of us out.

There are many questions which ought to be studied. The effect upon men
of going from heat to cold, such as Bowers coming to us from the Persian
Gulf: or vice versa of Simpson returning from the Antarctic to India;
differences of dry and damp cold; what is a comfortable temperature in
the Antarctic and what is it compared to a comfortable temperature in
England, the question of women in these temperatures...? The man with the
nerves goes farthest. What is the ratio between nervous and physical
energy? What is vitality? Why do some things terrify you at one time and
not at others? What is this early morning courage? What is the influence
of imagination? How far can a man draw on his capital? Whence came
Bowers' great heat supply? And my own white beard? and X's blue eyes: for
he started from England with brown ones and his mother refused to own him
when he came back? Growth and colour change in hair and skin?

There are many reasons which send men to the Poles, and the Intellectual
Force uses them all. But the desire for knowledge for its