Through snow and sleet and raging polar wind they staggered on, making for the cañonlike aperture in the hills to the north that showed faintly in the lulls of the storm. Famished for want of food, tortured with thirst that snow would not relieve, racked in every bone and muscle with the awful pain of extreme fatigue, and not daring to halt for fear of the drowsiness that fought the fatigue and presaged death, with the name of God often on their lips--but not in prayer--they degenerated in two nights and a day into a couple of unreasoning wild beasts; but not yet insane, for they remembered one another when they rounded a huge pinnacle of rock at the head of the cañon and met face to face. Two six-foot, bearded, ragged, and disheveled human brutes faced each other a hundred miles from their kind. And instead of their common suffering uniting them, their common soul mutually repelled them. But instead of silently and scowlingly backing away like the tomcats of boyhood, they snarled and growled incoherently like two rival polar bears, then turned and walked apart, each with what dignity he could assume under the circumstances. They did not enter the cañon; Smith turned east, Jones west, and their further suffering has no place in this story. They were on Hermite Island, and in time, with the help of sealers, Smith reached the Falklands, where he shipped before the mast for Liverpool; and Jones, Punta Arenas, where he got passage for Valparaiso. It is easy for believers in reincarnation to picture the history of this warfare of soul. Back in the beginning of things two monera collide, and, neither able to absorb the other, separate and remember. Two ameboid organisms struggle for the mastery and rend each other to death. Two monster fish battle in the warm, steaming sea, and swim away, wounded, to be devoured by their kind. Two huge reptiles war to the death. Two mammals fight and run. Two manlike apes grapple on the bough of a tree, and, locked in vicious embrace, with teeth buried in each other's flesh, fall to a common death on the ground. Two apelike men battle with clubs and crack each other's skull. Two human beings duel with sword or pistol and kill each other. Two babies meet in a park and squall. And never, from the beginning, victory for one or forgiveness from either.