Arctic and Antarctic: A Prospect of the Polar Regions.

p. 121: Outside the expedition’s little home the land is Nature’s own; there are no man-made contrivances issuing forth smoke and filth, no noise of wheels and engines, no newspapers lying and spreading scandals, and no ugliness of any kind. The land is as God made it, filled with peace and beauty.

p. 122, on the isolation and beauty of sledging journeys: Besides the consideration of people, things and abstracts, there is time too for some analysis of the mind that thinks, a realization of how it normally reacts, and how it might react if more carefully controlled. Days of lying up in a tiny tent, even a week at a stretch is not a time of boredom, nor in modern days a period of discomfort, though it is certainly a time of deep regret that the work in hand cannot progress. But the weather is a working of a Providence that no man can control, and must therefore be accepted and forgotten.

p. 123, quoting from Shackleton’s South: When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snow-fields, but across the storm-white seas that separated Elephant Island from our landing place on South Georgia.