'
Before this insult I stood with grinding teeth, but impotent. However,
from that moment a deeper mood of brooding malice occupied my spirit.
Indeed the humour of us all was one of dangerous, even murderous,
fierceness. In that pursuit of riches into that region of cold, we had
become almost like the beasts that perish.
* * * * *
On the 10th April we passed the 89th parallel of latitude, and though
sick to death, both in spirit and body, pressed still on. Like the lower
animals, we were stricken now with dumbness, and hardly once in a week
spoke a word one to the other, but in selfish brutishness on through a
real hell of cold we moved. It is a cursed region--beyond doubt
cursed--not meant to be penetrated by man: and rapid and awful was the
degeneration of our souls. As for me, never could I have conceived that
savagery so heinous could brood in a human bosom as now I felt it brood
in mine. If men could enter into a country specially set apart for the
habitation of devils, and there become possessed of evil, as we were so
would they be.
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