Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 14.djvu/22

2 clearly evidences that the inventive power of the aged master and his skill in conceiving and portraying a dramatic climax remained unimpaired even to the end.

For the background of this story, Verne returns chiefly to the region of Lake Erie and Niagara, the tremendous cataract which had so impressed him on his visit to it nearly forty years before, and which he had described in "The Floating City." ''As to the marvelous machine by which the Master of the World maintains his mastery, it is unlike Verne's earlier imaginative creations in that we are compelled sadly to admit that this last stupendous dream of the great romancer holds no appreciable possibility of ever being realised. Science is to-day as incredulous of the possibility of combining the lightness and superficial area of the airship with the weight and compactness of the submarine, as the supposed police of Washington show themselves in the story. Indeed, in reading it, one can scarce help sympathising with these unfortunate detectives, brought by the author face to face with a practically impossible problem and summoned to solve it by the workaday laws of common sense.''

''"The Sphinx of Ice," the third story in the present volume, was published in 1897. Its interest to Americans is much enhanced by the fact that it builds itself upon, is in fact a sequel to, our own Edgar Allan Poe's celebrated tale "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym."' In the present issue for Americans the retelling of Poe's tale and the earlier pages of aimless wandering from one Antarctic island to another, have been considerably abridged.''

''The story itself, once it is fairly launched upon its theme of search and strife and icy mystery is well deserving of remembrance. r As to the geography of the Antarctic Pole, however, Verne has been less happy than usual in his guesses. The daring expedition of Lieutenant Shackleton, who in /pop reached within less than a hundred miles of the pole, seems to have established that there is no warmer region such as Verne here describes, no open sea, indeed no polar passage whatsoever. On the contrary, the Southern Pole is surrounded by an icebound continent of unknown extent, and lies upon a mountainous table-land probably ten thousand feet in height.''