Much has been made of the feeling some have experienced, wherein, particularly at points of extremis, they sense someone else in their midst.
A Being with benign intent, whose presence may be designed to protect them from something untoward or inimical.
It may encourage them to make a last effort to survive.
The British poet T. S. Eliot spoke of this in his 1922 “The Waste Land” thusly:
“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?”
Eliot’s own note: “The… lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (… of [Ernest] Shackleton’s): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.”
But was it really a delusion, as Eliot thought?
Maybe it was something else.
The episode to which Eliot referred was the 1916 journey of Ernest Shackleton and 2 companions after their boat, the ‘Endurance,’ became trapped in ice in the Antarctic.
