Image description: A drypoint print depicting a rough, craggy, mountainous landscape, blowing with fierce winds. Three people, arm in arm, struggle their way down the slope. Among them is a fourth presence, a formless figure, that walks alongside them. End ID.
Who is the fourth who walks always beside you?
Vendémiaire CCXXXIV, drypoint on paper.
I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, “Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.” Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels “the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech” in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.
— Ernest Shackleton in South!
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
— T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land
