Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 1.djvu/224

 the pursuit of plants or insects. Each was an adept in his own line, and many a rare plant became the prey of the doctor, which cost as much to obtain as a pair of ivory tusks. These young people had never any occasion to save each other's life, nor to render any service whatever to each other. But a strong friendship existed between them. Fate might part them perhaps, but Friendship would always unite them again. Since their return to England they had frequently been separated in consequence of the long expeditions undertaken by the doctor, but upon his return he never failed to spend some weeks with his friend the Scotchman.

Dick talked of the past, Samuel prepared for the future. The one looked ahead, the other looked back. Ferguson was of a restless disposition, Kennedy was perfectly contented. For two years after his travels in Thibet the doctor did not speak of any new expeditions. Dick thought that his friend's taste for traveling, and his appetite for adventure, had been satisfied. He was delighted. That kind of thing is sure to end badly some day or other, he thought, whatever experience one has had of people; one cannot travel with impunity among cannibals and wild beasts. Kennedy, therefore, begged Samuel to "put the drag on" a bit, he having already done quite enough for science, and too much for human gratitude.

To this request the doctor made no reply, he remained buried in thought. Then he went to work again at his secret calculations, passing whole nights in working out his figures, and experimentalising upon curious machines of which no one knew anything. People, therefore, fancied that he had conceived some very grand notion in his busy brain.

"I wonder what he is thinking about," said Kennedy, when his friend had left him and returned to London in January. He made the discovery one morning in the columns of the Daily Telegraph.

"Good Heavens!" he cried, "the idiot, to think of crossing Africa in a balloon! This was all that was necessary to complete his vagaries! That is, then, what he has been thinking of these two years!"

If the reader will kindly substitute for the foregoing notes of exclamation certain hard blows of Kennedy's fist