EMMAUS ROAD

THE ROAD to Emmaus is not on any map. It is whatever road we take today. For some, it will be the 8.17 from Surbiton and the day in the City. For others, it will be the trail round Tesco, the dry-cleaners, the doctor’s, and the school-gate. The Emmaus road may be the first-class flight and the conference in New York. Or it may be the slow painful path from bed to tall chair and the drawn-out hours by the window.On every Emmaus road, there is the possibility of a stranger falling in step with us. We may or may not recognise him.

Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Emmaus road was the wild Antarctic seas, and the peaks and glaciers of the island of South Georgia. The crew of his ship, The Endurance, was stranded on Elephant Island. Shackleton set out in a small lifeboat for the coast of South Georgia, 800 miles away.He and his two companions traversed the island’s unmapped mountains to reach a remote whaling station. There Shackleton reported the plight of his crew, and mounted the expedition that would rescue them. The great explorer wrote of that journey:

When I look back at those days, I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snowfields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing-place on South Georgia. 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.’From South (1919)

T. S. Eliot, moved by Shackleton’s story and its echoes of the Emmaus journey, writes of the mysterious stranger who sometimes keeps us company:

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.

From The Waste Land (1922)

By John Pridmore