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?
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
In his endnotes to The Wasteland, Eliot pointed to Ernest Shackleton’s account of one of his Antarctic expeditions, in which the explorers maintained the delusion that there was an extra member present. It also clearly conjures up a biblical story from Luke 24 of travelers on the road to Emmaus, in which two disciples encounter a third presence on their journey, who is revealed to be a post-resurrection Jesus.
Third Man syndrome –
Perhaps one of the strangest phenomena of human survival is Third Man syndrome. Shackleton first described it, in which a strange companion appeared to him during the tough legs of his journey, but soon more and more people came forward to echo his experience. Mountain explorers, shipwreck survivors, and polar explorers have all claimed to have either seen a person or heard a voice, often providing helpful information on how they should escape their situation.
One of those people was British explorer Frank Smythe, who almost became the first person to summit Mount Everest in 1933. Along with his climbing party, Smythe made the intense journey towards the summit in poor conditions, but his party soon turned back after terrible weather and lack of oxygen made the summit an impossible task. Smythe continued, determined to complete the summit, but narrowly missed it by 304 meters (1,000 feet). While Smythe was completely alone, that isn’t how he remembered it.
“All the time that I was climbing alone, I had a strong feeling that I was accompanied by a second person. The feeling was so strong that it completely eliminated all loneliness I might otherwise have felt,” he recounted in his diary after the attempt.
At one point, Smythe was so convinced of his imaginary guide that he tried to share some Kendal mint cake with it, but upon turning around, realized there was no one there with him.
The Carpenter's Nail 