The only pleasures left them, the only breaks in the monotony of that
life, were to eat, and, when possible, to sleep. Thought, reason, and
reflection dwindled in their brains. Instincts--the primitive, elemental
impulses of the animal--possessed them instead. To eat, to sleep, to be
warm--they asked nothing better. The night's supper was a vision that
dwelt in their imaginations hour after hour throughout the entire day.
Oh, to sit about the blue flame of alcohol sputtering underneath the old
and battered cooker of sheet-iron! To smell the delicious savour of the
thick, boiling soup! And then the meal itself--to taste the hot, coarse,
meaty food; to feel that unspeakably grateful warmth and glow, that
almost divine sensation of satiety spreading through their poor,
shivering bodies, and then sleep; sleep, though quivering with cold;
sleep, though the wet searched the flesh to the very marrow; sleep,
though the feet burned and crisped with torture; sleep, sleep, the
dreamless stupefaction of exhaustion, the few hours' oblivion, the day's
short armistice from pain!

But stronger, more insistent than even these instincts of the animal was
the blind, unreasoned impulse that set their faces to the southward: "To
get forward, to get forward." Answering the resistless influence of
their leader, that indomitable man of iron whom no fortune could break
nor bend, and who imposed his will upon them as it were a yoke of
steel--this idea became for them a sort of obsession. Forward, if it
were only a yard; if it were only a foot. Forward over the
heart-breaking, rubble ice; forward against the biting, shrieking wind;
forward in the face of the blinding snow; forward through the brittle
crusts and icy water; forward, although every step was an agony, though
the haul-rope cut like a dull knife, though their clothes were sheets of
ice. Blinded, panting, bruised, bleeding, and exhausted, dogs and men,