IV Every Man to his Taste 59 



either of the poles except for scientific purposes, and 

 because going to polar regions is a dangerous and 

 difficult thing to do. Dr. Nansen, however, on that 

 occasion fairly revelled in memories of the beauty 

 of the arctic night, and plainly wearied for it ; and 

 finally chose to regard me as a sort of devoted martyr 

 for going to the equator. He seemed to regard that 

 as a desperate action, and adopted a sympathetic 

 kind of tone about fever, etc., to my extreme 

 amazement. It was clear enough that he thought 

 arctic exploration was at once enjoyable, reasonable, 

 and a thoroughly common-sense thing to undertake ; 

 but equatorial — well, for Science, yes, but not 

 otherwise. I have not yet got over the shock that 

 those few minutes gave me. If he had looked down 

 on the Equator it would have been easy to under- 

 stand ; he evidently loved Nature very truly, as I 

 do, though with such a difference ! To hear him 

 speak of equatorial Africa as dangerous was amazing, 

 when one came to think of the things he knew of — 

 a temperature of goodness knows what below zero, 

 crashing ice-floes, a diet of blubber, no soap, no wood 

 for fire, and every sort of real horror. It was posi- 

 tively comic to see how we both regarded our own 

 individual region as a kind of almshouse, but each 

 held the other's region in an awesome respect. 



Well, with my father I had no such profound 

 difference of opinion. He loved the tropics, and, 

 being by nature greater than I, he loved the arctic 

 regions as well, as I will show you later on. Where 



