24 SPITSBERGEN chap, ii 



Gregory's " Rift Valley " with immense delight, and the 

 additional advantage of being able to apply to him for a 

 running commentary, whereby the z"s of the tale were 

 merrily dotted and its ^s luminously crossed. I kept press- 

 ing him for hints about travellers' equipment, derived from 

 his own actual experience, and jotted down in my note- 

 book this advice : " Travellers should take with them a 

 sausage machine for tough meat, a bellows for bad fuel, 

 and a packet of seeds of quick-growing vegetables." Like 

 most men he only partially practised his preaching, for 

 there we were with neither sausage machine nor bellows. 

 We found him a mine of valuable and peculiar information, 

 most of which I have forgotten, though I carefully stowed 

 away the fact (whose historical accuracy 1 have not veri- 

 fied) that Tristan d'Acunha is an island where one of the 

 unappropriated female majority carried off and married a 

 shipwrecked sailor before he had time to dry. 



There is always work to be done to baggage by a fastidious 

 traveller. Studley overhauled the reindeer-skin sleeping-bags, 

 and improved upon his by sewing up both ends and open- 

 ing a hole in the side. After three hours' stitching he made 

 experiment of the result, and flopped about on the deck like 

 a small walrus. " It'll be jolly hot," said some one. " But 

 you'll want it to be jolly hot," replied the voice within the 

 bag; "it'll be jolly cold, you bet." Meanwhile Garwood 

 was vigorously testing our photographic outfit with the 

 usual result ; such is the phenomenal ineptitude of photo- 

 graphic manufacturers from a traveller's point of view. He 

 found that the cut films were in many cases too long to go 

 into the film-carriers and needed to have their ends reduced, 

 a process of course impossible of performance within the 

 narrow limits of a changing-bag, when fingers are blue with 

 cold. He found that one of our changing-bags was so stupidly 

 contrived that it could not be seen into through the glass 



