The ornithologist explains how it often happens that there is one member of the colony who becomes deranged. How, even if he fetched the misdirected penguin back, reunited it with its fellows and pointed it the right way, as soon as he let go it would immediately turn around again and resume its own course towards the hostile, boundless mountains which mark the southern limits of the Earth. ‘The deranged ones couldn’t possibly survive,’ the ornithologist says, and in all his years of study, he still doesn’t understand why they do it.
