My films, depicting as they did, fantastic and extraordinary landscapes and animals at the ends of the earth attracted much attention not only in scientific and geographic journals but in the popular press so that I began to find my services in greater demand. I was living comfortably and as I had the sagacity to secure all the copyrights to my negatives I found in my mid-thirties that I had more than enough money for my needs. So I began to choose my assignments with more care, selecting only those which promised adventurous and even bizarre circumstances in their commission. It was in 1931 that I first heard the name of Clark Ashton Scarsdale.

It was, I believe, in connection with the great sledge journey made in the Antarctic by the late Crosby Patterson; the cruel and tragic fate of Patterson and his five companions is too well-known to bear repetition, but Scarsdale had been consulted on certain aspects of their end. His opinions were widely reported in the press and I remember vividly one photograph, which depicted a strong, bearded figure, examining some of the curious rock inscriptions which had been found at the spot where the six Polar explorers had met death in a most terrible form.

A year or two after this I was myself commissioned to photograph the inscriptions by the Board of Trustees of the Chicago Museum which had originally financed Patterson’s great journey; this was a fascinating task and took me upwards of three weeks, though the inscriptions and their background are not relevant to this narrative. I later applied to and was given permission by the Trustees to publish a number of the photographs in Geographica, a learned magazine in which the increasing bulk of my work was to appear.

This material itself was the cause of further publicity and it was some two months following the publication of the Geographica pictures that I received the first of several enigmatic letters from Professor Scarsdale. But the preliminary contact with a being who was to have such a profound effect upon my life, was prosaic in the extreme. He merely offered congratulations on the technicalities involved in securing such original photographs and commented that they had been extremely helpful to him in his investigations.