The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras/Chapter 2.XXIV

Les Aventures du capitaine Hatteras - Seconde partie - 24

Of course, to eat at table, they were obliged to sit on the ground.

“But,” said Clawbonny, “who would n't give all the tallies and dining-rooms in the world, to dine in north latitude 89°59'15"?”

The thoughts of each one were about their situation. They had no other idea than the North Pole. The dangers they had undergone to reach it, those to overcome before returning, were forgotten in their unprecedented success. What neither Europeans, Americans, nor Asiatics had been able to do, they had accomplished.

Hence they were all ready to listen to the doctor when he told them all that his inexhaustible memory could recall about their position.

It was with real enthusiasm that he first proposed their captain's health.

“To John Hatteras!” he said.

“To John Hatteras!” repeated the others.

“To the North Pole!” answered the captain, with a warmth that was unusual in this man who was usually so self-restrained, but who now was in a state of great nervous excitement.

They touched glasses, and the toasts were followed by earnest hand-shakings.

“It is,” said the doctor, “the most important geographical fact of our day! Who would have thought that this discovery would precede that of the centre of Africa or Australia? Really, Hatteras, you air greater than Livingstone, Burton, and Barth! All honor to you!”

“You are right, Doctor,” said Altamont; “it would seem, from the difficulty of the undertaking, that the Pole would be the last place discovered, Whenever the government was absolutely determined to know the middle of Africa, it would have succeeded at the cost of so many men and so much money; but here nothing is less certain than success, and there might be obstacles really insuperable.”

“Insuperable!” cried Hatteras with warmth; “there are no insuperable obstacles; there are more or less determined minds, that is all!”

“Well,” said Johnson, “we are here, and it is well. But, Doctor, will you tell me, once for all, what there is so remarkable about the Pole?”

“It is this, Johnson, that it is the only motionless part of the globe, while all the rest is turning with extreme rapidity.”

“But I don't see that we are more motionless here than at Liverpool.”

“No more than you perceive the motion at Liverpool; and that is because in both cases you participate in the movement or the repose. But the fact is no less certain. The earth rotates in twenty-four hours, and this motion is on an axis with its extremities at the two poles. Well, we are at one of the extremities of the axis, which is necessarily motionless.”

“So,” said Bell, “when our countrymen are turning rapidly, we are perfectly still?”

“Very nearly, for we are not exactly at the Pole.”

“You are right, Doctor,” said Hatteras seriously, and shaking his head; “we are still forty-five seconds from the precise spot.”

“That is not far,” answered Altamont, “and we can consider ourselves motionless.”

“Yes,” continued the doctor, “while those living at the equator move at the rate of three hundred and ninety-six leagues an hour.”

“And without getting tired!” said Bell.

“Exactly!” answered the doctor.

“But,” continued Johnson, “besides this movement of rotation, does n't the earth also move about the sun?”

“Yes, and this takes a year.”

“Is it swifter than the other?”

“Infinitely so; and I ought to say that, although we are at the Pole, it takes us with it as well as all the people in the world. So our pretended immobility is a chimera: we are motionless with regard to the other points of the globe, but not so with regard to the sun.”

“Good!” said Bell, with an accent of comic regret; “so I, who thought I was still, was mistaken! This illusion has to be given up! One can't have a moment's peace in this world.”

“You are right, Bell,” answered Johnson; “and will you tell us, Doctor, how fast this motion is?”

“It is very fast,” answered the doctor; “the earth moves around the sun seventy-six times faster than a twenty-four-pound cannon-ball flies, which goes one hundred and ninety-five fathoms a second. It moves, then, seven leagues and six tenths per second; you see it is very different from the diurnal movement of the equator.”

“The deuce!” said Bell; “that is incredible, Doctor! More than seven leagues a second, and that when it would have been so easy to be motionless, if God had wished it!”

“Good!” said Altamont; “do you think so, Bell? In that case no more night, nor spring, nor autumn, nor winter!”

“Without considering a still more terrible result,” continued the doctor.

“What is that?” asked Johnson.

“We should all fall into the sun!”

“Fall into the sun!” repeated Bell with surprise.

“Yes. If this motion were to stop, the earth would fall into the sun in sixty-four days and a half.”

“A fall of sixty-four days!” said Johnson.

“No more nor less,” answered the doctor; “for it would have to fall a distance of thirty-eight millions of leagues.”

“What is the weight of the earth?” asked Altamont.

“It is five thousand eight hundred and ninety-one quadrillions of tons.”

“Good!” said Johnson; “those numbers have no meaning.”

“For that reason, Johnson, I was going to give you two comparisons which you could remember. Don't forget that it would take seventy-five moons to make the sun, and three hundred and fifty thousand earths to make up the weight of the sun.”

“That is tremendous!” said Altamont.

“Tremendous is the word,” answered the doctor; “but, to return to the Pole, no lesson on cosmography on this part of the globe could be more opportune, if it does n't weary you.”

“Go on, Doctor, go on!”

“I told you,” resumed the doctor, who took as much pleasure in giving as the others did in receiving instruction,—“I told you that the Pole was motionless in comparison with the rest of the globe. Well, that is not quite true!”

“What!” said Bell, “has that got to be taken back?”

“Yes, Bell, the Pole is not always exactly in the same place; formerly the North Star was farther from the celestial pole than it is now. So our Pole has a certain motion; it describes a circle in about twenty-six years. That comes from the precession of the equinoxes, of which I shall speak soon.”

“But,” asked Altamont, “might it not happen that some day the Pole should get farther from its place?”

“Ah, my dear Altamont,” answered the doctor, “you bring up there a great question, which scientific men investigated for a long time in consequence of a singular discovery.”

“What was that?”

“This is it. In 1771 the body of a rhinoceros was found on the shore of the Arctic Sea, and in 1799 that of an elephant on the coast of Siberia, How did the animals of warm countries happen to be found in these latitudes? Thereupon there was much commotion among geologists, who were not so wise as a Frenchman, M. Elie de Beaumont, has been since. He showed that these animals used to live in rather high latitudes, and that the streams and rivers simply carried their bodies to the places where they were found. But do you know the explanation which scientific men gave before this one?”

“Scientific men are capable of anything,” said Altamont.

“Yes, in explanation of a fact; well, they imagined that the Pole used to be at the equator and the equator at the Pole.”

“Bah!”

“It was exactly what I tell you. Now, if it had been so, since the earth is flattened more than five leagues at the pole, the seas, carried to the equator by centrifugal force, would have covered mountains twice as high as the Himalayas; all the countries near the polar circle, Sweden, Norway, Russia, Siberia, Greenland, and New Britain, would have been buried in five leagues of water, while the regions at the equator, having become the pole, would have formed plateaus fifteen leagues high!”

“What a change!” said Johnson.

“0, that made no difference to scientific men!”

“And how did they explain the alteration?” asked Altamont.

“They said it was due to the shock of collision with a comet. The comet is the deus es machina; whenever one comes to a difficult question in cosmography, a comet is lugged in. It is the most obliging of the heavenly bodies, and at the least sign from a scientific man it disarranges itself to arrange everything.”

“Then,” said Johnson, “according to you, Doctor, this change is impossible?”

“Impossible!”

“And if it should take place?”

“If it did, the equator would be frozen in twenty-four hours!”

“Good! if it were to take place now,” said Bell, “people would as likely as not say we had never gone to the Pole.”

“Calm yourself, Bell. To return to the immobility of the terrestrial axis, the following is the result: if we were to spend a winter here, we should see the stars describing a circle about us. As for the sun, the day of the vernal equinox, March 23d, it would appear to us (I take no account of refraction) exactly cut in two by the horizon, and would rise gradually in longer and longer curves; but here it is remarkable that when it has once risen it sets no more; it is visible for six mouths. Then its disk touches the horizon again at the autumnal equinox, September 22d, and as soon as it is set, it is seen no more again all winter.”

“You were speaking just now of the flattening of the earth at the poles,” said Johnson; “be good enough to explain that, Doctor.”

“I will. Since the earth was fluid when first created, you understand that its rotary movement would try to drive part of the mobile mass to the equator, where the centrifugal force was greater. If the earth had been motionless, it would have remained a perfect sphere; but in consequence of the phenomenon I have just described, it has an ellipsoidal form, and points at the pole are nearer the centre of the earth than points at the equator by about five leagues.”

“So,” said Johnson, “if our captain wanted to take us to the centre of the earth, we should have five leagues less to go?”

“Exactly, my friend.”

“Well, Captain, it's so much gained! We ought to avail ourselves of it.”

But Hatteras did not answer. Evidently he had lost all interest in the conversation, or perhaps he was listening without hearing.

“Well,” answered the doctor, “according to certain scientific men, it would be worth while to try this expedition.”

“What! really?” exclaimed Johnson.

“But let me finish,” answered the doctor. “I will tell you. I must first tell you this flattening of the poles is the cause of the precession of the equinoxes; that is to say, why every year the vernal equinox comes a day sooner than it would if the earth were perfectly round. This comes from the attraction of the sun operating in a different way on the heaped-up land of the equator, which then experiences a retrograde movement. Subsequently it displaces this Pole a little, as I just said. But, independently of this effect, this flattening ought to have a more curious and more personal effect, which we should perceive if we had mathematical sensibility.”

“What do you mean?” asked Bell.

“I mean that we are heavier here than at Liverpool.”

“Heavier?”

“Yes; ourselves, the dogs, our guns, and instruments!”

“Is it possible?”

“Certainly, and for two reasons: the first is, that we are nearer the centre of the globe, which consequently attracts us more strongly, and this force of gravitation is nothing but weight; the second is, the rotary force, which is nothing at the pole, is very marked at the equator, and objects there have a tendency to fly from the earth: they are less heavy.”

“What!” exclaimed Johnson, seriously; “have we not the same weight everywhere?”

“No, Johnson; according to Newton's law, bodies attract one another directly as their masses, and inversely to the square of their distances. Here I weigh more, because I am nearer the centre of attraction; and on another planet I should weigh more or less according to the mass of the planet.”

“What?” said Bell, “in the moon—”

“In the moon my weight, which is two hundred pounds at Liverpool, would be only thirty-two pounds.”

“And in the sun?”

“0, in the sun I should weigh more than five thousand pounds!”

“Heavens!” said Bell; “you'd need a derrick to move your legs.”

“Probably,” answered the doctor, laughing at Bell's amazement; “but here the difference is imperceptible, and by an equal effort of the muscles Bell would leap as high as on the docks at Liverpool.”

“Yes, but in the sun?” urged Bell.

“My friend,” answered the doctor, “the upshot of it all is that we are well off where we are, and need not want to go elsewhere.”

“You said just now,” resumed Altamont, “that perhaps it would be worth while to make a journey to the centre of the world; has such an undertaking ever been thought off?”

“Yes, and this is all I'm going to say about the Pole. There is no point in the world which has given rise to more chimeras and hypotheses. The ancients, in their ignorance, placed the garden of the Hesperides there. In the Middle Ages it was supposed that the earth was upheld on axles placed at the poles, on which it revolved: but when comets were seen moving freely, that idea had to be given up. Later, there was a French astronomer, Bailly, who said that the lost people mentioned by Plato, the Atlantides, lived here. Finally, it has been asserted in our own time that there was an immense opening at the poles, from which came the Northern Lights, and through which one could reach the inside of the earth; since in the hollow sphere two planets, Pluto and Proserpine, were said to move, and the air was luminous in consequence of the strong pressure it felt.”

“That has been maintained?” asked Altamont.

“Yes, it has been written about seriously. Captain Symmes, a countryman of ours, proposed to Sir Humphrey Davy, Humboldt, and Arago, to undertake the voyage! But they declined.”

“And they did well.”

“I think so. Whatever it may be, you see, my friends, that the imagination has busied itself about the Pole, and that sooner or later we must come to the reality.”

“At any rate, we shall see for ourselves,” said Johnson, who clung to his idea.

“Then, to-morrow we'll start,” said the doctor, smiling at seeing the old sailor but half convinced; “and if there is any opening to the centre of the earth, we shall go there together.”