Page:The Worst Journey in the World volume 2.djvu/352

Rh survey a route, if then. "Dogs could certainly have come up as far as this," I heard Scott say somewhere under the Cloudmaker, approximately half-way up the glacier, but the best thing you could do with dogs in pressure such as we all experienced on our way down would be to drop them into the nearest chasm. If you can avoid such messes well and good: if not, you must not rely on dogs, and the people who talk of these things have no knowledge.

If Scott was going up the Beardmore he was probably right not to take dogs: actually he relied on ponies to the foot of the glacier and man-haulage on from that point. Because he relied on ponies he was not able to start before November: the experience of the Depôt Journey showed that ponies could not stand the weather conditions before that date. But he could have started earlier if he had taken dogs, in place of ponies, to the foot of the glacier. This would have gained him a few days in his race against the autumn conditions when returning.

Such tragedies inevitably raise the question, "Is it worth it?" What is worth what? Is life worth risking for a feat, or losing for your country? To face a thing because it was a feat, and only a feat, was not very attractive to Scott: it had to contain an additional object—knowledge. A feat had even less attraction for Wilson, and it is a most noteworthy thing in the diaries which are contained in this book, that he made no comment when he found that the Norwegians were first at the Pole: it is as though he felt that it did not really matter, as indeed it probably did not.

It is most desirable that some one should tackle these and kindred questions about polar life. There is a wealth of matter in polar psychology: there are unique factors here, especially the complete isolation, and four months' darkness every year. Even in Mesopotamia a long-suffering nation insisted at last that adequate arrangements must be made to nurse and evacuate the sick and wounded. But at the Poles a man must make up his mind that he may be rotting of scurvy (as Evans was) or living for ten months on half-rations of seal and full rations of ptomaine poison-