Third Man Syndrome

In 1916, struggling across the mountains of South Georgia after the loss of the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton sensed that his party of three had become four. T.S. Eliot carried the idea into The Waste Land with "Who is the third who walks always beside you?", also a reference to the biblical tale of the Road to Emmaus where a mysterious unseen companion accompanies two disciples. The Third Man has shadowed explorers ever since: the belief, at the far edge of exhaustion, fear or grief, that someone unseen has come to walk alongside.

Poet Kathleen Jamie has written a new narrative poem in which that presence speaks, and sets it among people who have met it. Stephen Venables, descending alone from the summit of Everest; Peter Hillary, on the long haul to the South Pole; Chamonix mountain guide Jean-Franck Charlet remembers a glacier he had to cross alone, roped to an unknown companion.

In a deer hide in the Scottish hills, mountaineer Sandy Allan recalls the white rabbit in a red waistcoat that kept him company on Nanga Parbat, and Liz Duff, the first Scottish woman on Everest, describes the day in 1985 when she and two others watched a figure carry a load along Everest's North-East Ridge. The climbers at the next camp saw no one arrive.

Is it the mind protecting itself, or something else? Between the voices, the wind and the ice, Kathleen Jamie listens for who is there.

With thanks to Globule Radio Chamonix for recording Jean-Franck.

Presenter: Kathleen Jamie
Producer: Victoria Ferran
A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 4