Their masculinity, which in itself is of the brute, has been over-developed.

The other and spiritual side of their natures has been dwarfed--atrophied, in fact.
They are a company of celibates, grinding harshly against one another and growing daily more calloused from the grinding.

It seems to me impossible sometimes that they ever had mothers.

It would appear that they are a half-brute, half-human species, a race apart, wherein there is no such thing as sex; that they are hatched out by the sun like turtle eggs, or receive life in some similar and sordid fashion; and that all their days they fester in brutality and viciousness, and in the end die as unlovely as they have lived.
Rendered curious by this new direction of ideas, I talked with Johansen last night--the first superfluous words with which he has favoured me since the voyage began.

He left Sweden when he was eighteen, is now thirty-eight, and in all the intervening time has not been home once.