I AM BEGINNING to find what is happening, or not
happening, at the South Pole almost as big a bore as what is happening, or not happening, to the Misses Bartok, Dors, Mansfield and Kennedy. The main object of the expeditions to the Antarc- tic, no doubt a potentially valuable one, was to make observations in connection with the Inter- national Geophysical Year. Whether the parties concerned reached the Pole or not was and is immaterial, as there happens to be an established American base there 'which, presumably, is doing all the observing that is required. Sir Edmund Hillary, apparently, felt the urge to go to the Pole—presumably for either prestige or publicity; now he is objecting_to Dr. Fuchs trying to do the same thing. For all I know the publicity attached to the overland journey to the Pole may have been valuable; funds for some future enterprise, after all, may be easier to collect if its predecessor has appeared to have been successful. But a jour- ney to the Pole undertaken at the expense of time which could have been given to scientific survey and leading to' some rather dreary backbiting seems hard to,juStify.
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