Under the Sea to the North Pole (21 page)

He was going at fourteen knots.

D’Ermont, however, was not at ease. As soon as he was alone and had no reason for masking his anxiety, his face became serious and thoughtful. De Keralio had told him of this subterranean voyage, but had said nothing of its duration; and this duration was now becoming long.

The continued immersion under the waves frightened him; a

feeling of sickness was gaining on him. It seemed that this vault was about to crush in upon him. For a moment he thought this was due to the effect on his mind of the extraordinary situation in which he found himself. He soon recognized that it was due to a purely physical cause, which threatened a very serious danger.

The atmosphere was changing from worse to worse. The lower strata, under the pressure of the breathable air, was slowly disengaging carbonic oxide. The gas was rising. It was now a foot above the deck. Two of the lighted candles had gone out.

Around, the sea continued luminous, absolutely saturated with electrical effluences. The boat was passing through a permanent and liquid aurora.

Hubert anxiously looked ahead. He thought the colours were a trifle fainter. He turned on more hydrogen into the motor. He was running nearly sixteen knots.

But then a curious phenomenon occurred.

With his eyes fixed on the compass, the reversed needle of which indicated the north
a contrario,
he saw with amazement that the boat was drifting at an angle of forty-five degrees.

At the very moment he noticed this, the submarine light suddenly began to fade, and in a few minutes darkness reigned around.

Hubert lighted his lamp and looked out. Nothing could he see but water. There was no wall, no basaltic column, no vault in sight.

“Are we out of the tunnel?” he asked.

To assure himself of this the only thing to do was to rise to the surface.

This he decided to do.

But the water-tanks had to be emptied, and he had to awake Guerbraz, whose help was indispensable. Together they succeeded in working the valves and letting the water out.

They had not long to wait for the result. The boat, relieved, rose with the rapidity of the bubbles of gas which break on the surface in contact with the air.

At the same time the sea resumed its internal illumination. The immense electric source of light deep down in its depths dispersed its faint violet light in all directions.

But as soon as the boat reached the open air, and Hubert, with a hymn of thankfulness, slipped open the hood to let in the pure atmosphere, he saw the explanation of the movement of deviation he had been unable to comprehend.

He was on the inner side of the barrier of ice accumulated on the rocky girdle of the Pole. The sea on which he was floating was entirely free and of milky whiteness. It was violently agitated, and a continuous roar was heard.

Above, the sky was of a pale blue, and of limitless depth. Although it was daylight, the stars could be seen. Round t h e horizon the two men saw that the blue sky formed a circle below which were stormy grey clouds, indicating that here along the belt of palaeocrystic ice the cold recovered its rights.

The boat continued to drift. The angle, which had been forty-five, was now sixty, showing that the boat was not heading- straight for the Pole, but turning at a tangent to a polar circle. The truth flashed on D’Ermont.

“The rotation of the earth!” he said in a whisper to Guerbraz, who looked and did not understand.

And then he explained the matter to the sailor.

Instead of steering straight for the Pole, which was impossible owing to the enormous centrifugal force that kept the waves moving in the same direction as the earth was spinning round its axis, the boat was headed so as to attack the concentric eddies obliquely. There was no fear of being sucked into the centre, for, unlike the Maelstrom, the eddy moved from within, outwards.

Isabelle had been asleep more than six hours. Hubert, thinking her rest had been long enough, and not wishing to deprive her of the sight of the spectacle, resolved to wake her, so that she might be in readiness for anything sudden and unexpected.

It was an exclamation of joy that escaped from her lips.

And so the problem, the object of their investigations and their researches, had received its solution while she slept. She had fallen asleep deep down in the waters; she awoke in open day, breathing pure, fresh air. And the Pole was there quite near to them, a few kilometres from the circle of their rotation.

“Are we going there?” she asked without preamble. “Yes,” said D’Ermont, laughing, “we are going there.” And stretching out his hand he showed on the horizon, a few thousand fathoms away, a white line above which floated a ring or crown of cloud.

The boat continued to leap inwards from one circle to the other. It drove on, gaining yard by yard, to the crest of the funnel.

Suddenly there was heard a sharp noise; at the same instant the mist cleared, and revealed the mysterious centre of the abyss.

It was a marvellous picture, a sight the like of which the human eye had never seen.

The centre of the Pole was an island.

But what an island, and what a centre!

Around it the sea rose in a gigantic roll of water quite sixty feet high, the slope of it like a crystal hill. On the summit was a fringe of foam bounding upwards in dazzling snow, and dashing its glittering spray high in the air.

Faster and faster sped the boat. At last this crest was reached, and the wondering explorers stood amazed at the incomparable beauty of the picture. They could imagine they were in some supernatural world.

Above them the polar land covered with brilliant verdure looked like a living emerald. Dwarf shrubs, thickly covered with foliage, displayed all the attractions of a flora unknown in any other part of the globe. By the extraordinary mildness of the temperature, it was soon seen that eternal spring reigned in this motionless centre on which the only breeze was that coming from the circling eddy of the ocean, and the only rain the delicate vapour from the spray falling in imponderable dust.

The boat had only just passed the level of the roll when she glided by her own weight on the compact mass of condensed water, as on the face of a mirror, and gently grounded on the sand that girt the polar island.

“In truth,” said Isabelle, clapping her, hands, “this ought to be the entrance into Paradise.”

“That is true,” replied Hubert. “And I must say it completely upsets all the ideas I had of the Pole.”

“I had always understood,” said Guerbraz, “that the Pole was occupied either by a boundless sea or by a volcano in constant eruption.”

“Yes, Guerbraz,” said D’Ermont, “and scientists had every reason to believe so. But they did not allow for all the phenomena of rotation; and it is manifest to us that this centrifugal force will explain it all. There is only one thing I cannot understand.”

“And what is that?” asked Isabelle.

“This. The duration of the polar night at the Pole itself ought to be exactly six months. What becomes of. this happy climate during the absence of the sun?”’

There was no reply, for only nature herself could furnish the explanation of this inconceivable singularity.

The officer had remarked that, as the bow of the boat touched the shore, there had been a flash of light in front and a rather powerful shock had thrown the boat back into the sea. But an instant afterwards, after a series of small sparks along the ground, the frail hull of aluminum had rested on the beach.

This observation put him on his guard.

He said to himself that the whole island was like a Leyden jar, and that any contact might destroy the equilibrium of the magnetic forces spread over its surface.

Consequently it was not advisable to set foot on the island without an endeavour to diminish the shock of the electric discharge. He therefore ran to the bow and took a boathook, which he was going to use as a leaping pole.

He had no chance of trying his theory before an experiment confirmed it.

In fact, Isabelle, without attending to her cousin’s advice, and having no suspicion of the danger she might be running, jumped ashore from the deck of the boat.

A cry of terror warned Hubert, who with one spring, aided by the boat-hook, had also landed.

But Isabelle’s terror was not of long duration. The first shock had knocked her down. But she rose safe and sound, and ran up laughing to meet her cousin.

“Well, Hubert,” she said, “you see I am not dead.”

“You are very thoughtless, Isabelle,” said the young man, affectionately. “Did you not see that this ground is absolutely saturated with electricity?”

“No, really I did not. But now the thing is done there is no need to return to the subject. What an enchanted place this Pole is!”

”Ah! my word, yes!” said Guerbraz, who had just landed as Isabelle did, and, like her, had been knocked over.

“Well,” said D’Ermont, “I suppose we had better explore our island.”

And they walked along the shore. This first view was a long subject of astonishment and admiring curiosity.

They noticed, in the first place, the strange density of the water encircling the island like the counterscarp of a fortress. As if drawn up by some gigantic suction, the wave rose in a gentle slope about fifty yards wide to a height of twenty yards, forming with the island a regular basin, of which the ground they were on was the bottom.

And the shore ran far out under this rampart of waves, that were so dense as to appear solidified.

Hubert, more and more amazed, endeavoured to discover the solution of the strange problem.

One solution he found, but it only satisfied half the conditions.

The island was evidently a single mass of granite, with ^no fissure in it through which there was communication with the sea. In this way it was intelligible that the globe’s rotation round its axis would be enough to keep the surrounding waters above the level of the land, and that this wonderful barrier would thus rise as if it were a dyke and be much more lasting than any similar work from the hand of man, though the millenarian influence of the precession of the equinoxes might one day modify this state of things which was so puzzling to human reason.

But this hypothesis had to be verified, and there were hardly the means to do so then.

The three companions went towards the centre of the island.

The compass was of no use. The needle was literally distracted, and gave no precise indication. It would remain in any direction it was thought fit to give it. There were no stars clear enough to serve as guides, although, in spite of the daylight, several could be distinguished, and more especially the Great Bear.

Some artificial method must be tried. Hubert took the boat for his starting point. He stepped the mast and hoisted the tricolour. Then, taking the shore as his base he walked inland at right angles to it.

The way lay through a sort of dwarf forest. Plants of all species, from the fern of the humid temperates to the palm of the tropics, lay thick around them, and through them there was difficulty in finding a path. The fauna was even more singular. Here and there a few butterflies rose above orchid flowers of the strangest aspect. A few birds, like swallows and snow buntings, were chasing them. Lizards of curious appearance crept among the fragments of a soil so compact that it looked like hard clay rubble.

But as they went onwards’ the explorers felt the ground sloping downwards. Evidently rotation not only affected the sea, but the land. The Pole, already so full of surprising revelations, had doubtless many others in reserve.

“If we go on like this,” said Isabelle, gaily, “the centre of the world may be a hole.”

“You could not have been nearer the mark,” said Guerbraz. “Just look down there!”

They had just reached a point in the descent where, through a break in the curtain of verdure, the eye could see into the very heart of the island. All round there was a carpet of verdure, and there was every sign of a mild and equable climate. A circular valley was at the bottom, and in the valley was a lake with the water so calm and limpid that they might have taken it for a silver mirror, had it not been for the presence, in its very centre, of a jet of water of prodigious height, breaking aloft into a glittering sheaf, radiant with all the hues of the rainbow.

Hardly believing their eyes, the three companions hurried downward and reached the lake.

Isabelle de Keralio was right; the centre of the earth was a hole.

CHAPTER XIV

FROM THE CENTRE.

Y
ES, the centre of the globe was a hole, for when the travellers reached its borders the jet of water existed no longer, the silver lake had disappeared, and in its place all they saw was a frightful abyss, a chasm of from a thousand to twelve hundred metres in diameter, with almost smooth perpendicular walls, the bottom of which was invisible, the open void being full of fleecy vapours, which rose in capricious undulations to within thirty feet of the surface but never reached it.

The three explorers were of the same mind; they said the same thing.