Yet, as it were, his arm reached out and touched me, even there.

His disappearance had been explained by a hundred different guesses on the ship—­all plausible enough.  I had no idea that anyone connected me in any way with his death.

But on our twenty-second day of march, 140 miles from our goal, he caused a conflagration of rage and hate to break out among us three.

It was at the end of a march, when our stomachs were hollow, our frames ready to drop, and our mood ravenous and inflamed.  One of Mew’s dogs was sick:  it was necessary to kill it:  he asked me to do it.

‘Oh,’ said I, ‘you kill your own dog, of course.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ he replied, catching fire at once, ’you ought to be used to killing, Jeffson.’

‘How do you mean, Mew?’ said I with a mad start, for madness and the flames of Hell were instant and uppermost in us all:  ’you mean because my profession——­’

‘Profession! damn it, no,’ he snarled like a dog:  ’go and dig up David Wilson—­I dare say you know where to find him—­and he will tell you my meaning, right enough.’

I rushed at once to Clark, who was stooping among the dogs, unharnessing:  and savagely pushing his shoulder, I exclaimed: 

‘That beast accuses me of murdering David Wilson!’

‘Well?’ said Clark.

‘I’d split his skull as clean——!’

‘Go away, Adam Jeffson, and let me be!’ snarled Clark.

‘Is that all you’ve got to say about it, then—­you?’

‘To the devil with you, man, say I, and let me be!’ cried he:  ’you know your own conscience best, I suppose.’

Before this insult I stood with grinding teeth, but impotent.  However, from that moment a deeper mood of brooding malice occupied my spirit.  Indeed the humour of us all was one of dangerous, even murderous, fierceness.  In that pursuit of riches into that region of cold, we had become almost like the beasts that perish.

* * * * *

On the 10th April we passed the 89th parallel of latitude, and though sick to death, both in spirit and body, pressed still on.  Like the lower animals, we were stricken now with dumbness, and hardly once in a week spoke a word one to the other, but in selfish brutishness on through a real hell of cold we moved.  It is a cursed region—­beyond doubt cursed—­not meant to be penetrated by man:  and rapid and awful was the degeneration of our souls.  As for me, never could I have conceived that savagery so heinous could brood in a human bosom as now I felt it brood in mine.  If men could enter into a country specially set apart for the habitation of devils, and there become possessed of evil, as we were so would they be.

* * * * *

As we advanced, the ice every day became smoother; so that, from four miles a day, our rate increased to fifteen, and finally (as the sledges lightened) to twenty.