On the outward march we were not severely hungry until we reached the great glacier, and then we were so occupied with the dangers of climbing and of crossing crevasses that we were unable to talk much. And afterwards on the plateau our faces were generally so covered with ice that unnecessary conversation was out of the question. It was on the march back, after we had got down the glacier, and were tramping over the Barrier surface that we talked freely of food. Strange feelings, indeed, did I have when I looked back over our notes, and saw the wonderful meals that we promised to eat when we could get inside a really good restaurant. We used to tell each other, with perfect seriousness, about the new dishes that we had thought of, and if the dish met with general approval there would be a chorus of "Ah! That's good." The "Wild roll" was admitted to be the high-water mark of gastronomic luxury. He proposed that the cook should take a supply of well-seasoned minced meat, wrap it in rashers of fat bacon, and place around the whole an outer covering of rich pastry so that it would take the form of a big sausage-roll. Then this roll was to be fried with plenty of fat. My best dish, which I admit I put forward with a good deal of pride as we marched over the snow, was a sardine pasty. And I remember that one day Marshall came forward with a proposal for a thick roll of suet pudding with plenty of jam all over it, and there arose quite a heated argument whether he could claim this dish to be an invention, or whether it was not the jam roll already known to the housewives of civilisation. One point there was on which we were all agreed, and that was our wish not to have any jellies or things of that sort at our future meals. The idea of eating such slippery stuff as jelly did not appeal in the least to any one of us. Perhaps all this sounds very greedy and uncivilised to anyone who has never been on the verge of starvation, but I wish to say again that hunger makes a man primitive. Not a smile broke from us as we planned wonderful feats of over-eating, in truth we were intensely serious about the matter, and we noted down in the back pages of our diaries details of feasts we would have when we got back to the land of plenty. The dysentery from which we suffered was certainly due to the meat from the pony Grisi. This animal was shot when greatly fatigued, and I think that his flesh was poisoned by the presence of the poison of exhaustion, as is the case with animals that have been hunted. The manner in which we contrived to continue marching when suffering, and the speed with which we recovered when we got good food, were rather remarkable, and the reason doubtless was that the dysentery was due to poison, and was not produced by organic trouble.