st time for four months.

Looking back I realized two things. That sledging, at any rate in summer
and autumn, was a much less terrible ordeal than my imagination had
painted it, and that those Hut Point days would prove some of the
happiest in my life. Just enough to eat and keep us warm, no more--no
frills nor trimmings: there is many a worse and more elaborate life. The
necessaries of civilization were luxuries to us: and as Priestley found
under circumstances compared to which our life at Hut Point was a Sunday
School treat, the luxuries of civilization satisfy only those wants which
they themselves create.

FOOTNOTES:

[117] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 180-81.

[118] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 187-188. Scott
started for the Pole on November 1, 1911. Amundsen started
on September 8, 1911, but had to turn back owing to low
temperatures; he started again on October 19.

[119] Priestley's diary.

[120] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 185.

[121] See p. 123.

[122] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 190-191.

[123] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 191-192.

[124] Wilson camped with the two dog-teams on the land, and in the
morning saw us floating on the ice-floes through his
field-glasses. He made his way along the peninsula until he
could descend on to the Barrier, where he joined Scott.

[125] I think he was stiff after standing so many hours.--A. C.-G.

[126] Scott, _The Voyage of the Discovery_, vol. i. p. 350.

[127] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 201.

[128] Bowers.

[129] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 207.

[130] My own diary.

[131] Bowers.

[132] My own diary.

[133] Bowers' letter.

CHAPTER VI

THE FIRST WINTER

The highest object that human beings can set before themselves is
not the pursuit of any such chimera as the annihilation of the
unknown; it is simply the unwearied endeavour to remove its
boundaries a little further from our little sphere of
action.--HUXLEY.

And so we came back to our comfortable hut. Whatever merit there may be
in going to the Antarctic, once there you must not credit yourself for
being there. To spend a year in the hut at Cape Evans because you explore
is no more laudable than to spend a month at Davos because you have
consumption, or to spend an English winter at the