THE WINTER JOURNEY 281 
slope, so hard that a pick made little impression upon it, 
so slippery that if you started down in finnesko you never 
could stop: this ended in a great ice-cliff some hundreds 
of feet high, and then came miles of pressure ridges, 
crevassed and tumbled, in which you might as well look 
for a daisy as a tent: and after that the open sea. The 
chances, however, were that the tent had just been taken 
up into the air and dropped somewhere in this sea well on 
the way to New Zealand. Obviously the tent was gone. 
Face to face with real death one does not think of the 
things that torment the bad people in the tracts, and fill 
the good people with bliss. I might have speculated on 
my chances of going to Heaven; but candidly I did not 
care. I could not have wept if I had tried. I had no wish 
to review the evils of my past. But the past did seem to 
have been a bit wasted. The road to Hell may be paved 
with good intentions: the road to Heaven is paved with 
lost opportunities. 
I wanted those years over again. What fun I would have 
with them: what glorious fun! It was a pity. Well has 
the Persian said that when we come to die we, remember- 
ing that God is merciful, will gnaw our elbows with re- 
morse for thinking of the things we have not done for fear 
of the Day of Judgment. 
And I wanted peaches and syrup—badly. We had 
them at the hut, sweeter and more luscious than you can 
imagine. And we had been without sugar for a month. 
Yes—especially the syrup. 
Thus impiously I set out to die, making up my mind 
that I was not going to try and keep warm, that it might 
not take too long, and thinking I would try and get some 
morphia from the medical case if it got very bad. Nota bit 
heroic, and entirely true! Yes! comfortable, warm reader. 
Men do not fear death, they fear the pain of dying. 
And then quite naturally and no doubt disappointingly 
to those who would like to read of my last agonies (for 
who would not give pleasure by his death?) I fellasleep. I 
expect the temperature was pretty high during this great 
blizzard, and anything near zero was very high to us. 
