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thought that he might have saved them had he taken the dogs further before the next winter closed
in.
For Cherry, as for the dying Scott, the whole business became an apotheosis. He ends the topic
like this:
And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression,
go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do
much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are
mad, and nearly all will say, 'What is the use?' For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shop-
keeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And
so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that
is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as
all you want is a penguin's egg.
His prose is divine, its mournful echoing cadences reminiscent of a great badly-lit railway sta-
tion where people are saying goodbye. Among the youngest of Scott's men, Cherry was a typical
Edwardian landed gentleman, a classicist and a rower, and he was very popular in the south. Des-
pite shockingly bad eyesight, besides being one of the best sledgers, he was the editor of the South
Polar Times and Wilson's indefatigable zoological assistant. The transmogrification he effected
did not keep his demons at bay, and he spent a large part of his later years suffering from depres-
sion.
Shortly after I had returned from Chile, I found a battered copy of The Worst Journey in a
secondhand bookshop. Knowing almost nothing about Antarctica, I lay in the hammock on my
roof for an hour's respite after a murderously frustrating morning in front of the word processor.
With a duvet over me, I grasped the topic in one hand so that it hovered in mid-air above my face.
I had been invited to a birthday party that night, and in a burst of organisational zeal I had already
ironed my frock, which was hanging, ready for duty, from the picture rail in my bedroom. But
I never went to the party. I closed the topic at four in the morning - by then inside on the sofa,
though still under the duvet. 'This journey had beggared our language,' Cherry wrote, but he had
searched within himself and produced a masterpiece.
The Worst Journey has slipped the shackles of its period and entered the immortal zone. It
has influenced countless people, and pops up unexpectedly in volumes of memoirs and essays by
writers from Nancy Mitford to Paul Theroux. George Bernard Shaw, a friend of Cherry's, had cast
his eye over an early draft, and in his biography of Shaw, Michael Holroyd wrote, 'In Shaw's
imagination the appalling conditions of the Antarctic became a metaphor for the moral climate of
Britain between the wars, and Cherry-Garrard's survival a triumph of human will over social ad-
versity.'
Cherry, Wilson and Bowers had built a rock shelter they called an igloo near the Cape Crozier
emperor penguin colony. This was where the tent had blown away. I had an overpowering desire
to lie in what was left of their shelter. There, I thought, I could pay homage.
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