epeat during
the blank hours of the daily march, when the idle mind is all too apt to
think of food in times of hunger, or possibly of purely imaginary
grievances, which may become distorted into real foundations of discord
under the abnormal strain of living for months in the unrelieved company
of three other men. If your companions have much the same tastes as
yourself it is best to pool your allowance of weights and take one book
which will offer a wide field of thought and discussion. I have heard
Scott and Wilson bless the thought which led them to take Darwin's Origin
of Species on their first Southern Journey. Such is the object of your
sledging book, but you often want the book which you read for half an
hour before you go to sleep at Winter Quarters to take you into the
frivolous fripperies of modern social life which you may not know and may
never wish to know, but which it is often pleasant to read about, and
never so much so as when its charms are so remote as to be entirely
tantalizing.

Scott, who always amazed me by the amount of work he got through without
any apparent effort, was essentially the driving force of the expedition:
in the hut quietly organizing, working out masses of figures, taking the
greatest interest in the scientific work of the station, and perhaps
turning out, quite by the way, an elaborate paper on an abstruse problem
in the neighbourhood; fond of his pipe and a good book, Browning, Hardy
(Tess was one of his favourites), Galsworthy. Barrie was one of his
greatest friends.

He was eager to accept suggestions if they were workable, and always keen
to sift even the most unlikely theories if by any means they could be
shaped to the desired end: a quick and modern brain which he applied with
thoroughness to any question of practice or theory. Essentially an
attractive personality, with strong likes and dislikes, he excelled in
making his followers his friends by a few words of sympathy or praise: I
have never known anybody, man or woman, who could be so attractive when
he chose.

Sledging he went harder than any man of whom I have ever heard. Men never
realized Scott until they had gone sledging with him. On our way up the
Beardmore Glacier we were going at top pressure some seventeen hours out
of the twenty-four, and when we turned out in the morning we felt as
though we had only just turned in. By lunch time we felt that it was
impossible to get through in the afternoon a similar a