But now the Barrier comes back to us, with its clean, open
life, and the smell of the cooker, and its soft sound sleep. So much of
the trouble of this world is caused by memories, for we only remember
half.
We have forgotten--or nearly forgotten--how the loss of a biscuit crumb
left a sense of injury which lasted for a week; how the greatest friends
were so much on one another's nerves that they did not speak for days for
fear of quarrelling; how angry we felt when the cook ran short on the
weekly bag; how sick we were after the first meals when we could eat as
much as we liked; how anxious we were when a man fell ill many hundreds
of miles from home, and we had a fortnight of thick weather and had to
find our depots or starve. We remember the cry of _Camp Ho!_ which
preceded the cup of tea which gave us five more miles that evening; the
good fellowship which completed our supper after safely crossing a bad
patch of crevasses; the square inch of plum pudding which celebrated our
Christmas Day; the chanties we sang all over the Barrier as we marched
our ponies along.
We travelled for Science. Those three small embryos from Cape Crozier,
that weight of fossils from Buckley Island, and that mass of material,
less spectacular, but gathered just as carefully hour by hour in wind and
drift, darkness and cold, were striven for in order that the world may
have a little more knowledge, that it may build on what it knows instead
of on what it thinks.
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