CAUSE OF DYSENTERY 



I daresay that all this sounds very greedy and 

 uncivilised to the reader who has never been on the 

 verge of starvation, but as I have said before, hunger 

 makes a man primitive. We did not smile at our- 

 selves or at each other as we planned wonderful feats 

 of over-eating. We were perfectly serious about the 

 matter, and we noted down in the back pages of our 

 diaries details of the meals that we had decided to have 

 as soon as we got back to the places where food was 

 plentiful. All the morning we would allow our imagi- 

 nations to run riot in this fashion. Then would come 

 one o'clock, and I would look at my watch and say, 

 " Camp ! " We would drop the harness from our tired 

 bodies and pitch the tent on the smoothest place avail- 

 able, and three of us would get inside to wait for the 

 thin and scanty meal, while the other man filled the 

 cooker with snow and fragments of frozen meat. An 

 hour later we would be on the march again, once more 

 thinking and talking of food, and this would go on 

 until the camp in the evening. We would have another 

 scanty meal, and turn into the sleeping-bags, to dream 

 wildly of food that somehow we could never manage 

 to eat. 



The dysentery from which we suffered during the 

 latter part of the journey back to the coast was certainly 

 due to the meat from the pony Grisi. This animal was 

 shot one night when in a greatly exhausted condition, 

 and I believe that his flesh was made poisonous by the 

 presence of the toxin of exhaustion, as is the case with 

 animals that have been hunted. Wild was the first to 

 suffer, at the time when we started to use Grisi meat 

 with the other meat, and he must have been unfortunate 

 enough to get the greater part of the bad meat on that 

 occasion. The other meat we were using then came 

 from Chinaman, and seemed to be quite wholesome. 



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