Under the Sea to the North Pole (22 page)

“We have been the sport of a dream or a mirage.”

However, fatigue was overcoming them. The continuous daylight had been strangely abused, and excited by the marvels they met at every step, they had lost all count of the hours. When Hubert looked at his watch he saw that twenty-two more hours had elapsed since their landing on the island.

Twenty-two hours, a night and a day! Nature claimed her rights and demanded sleep.

They pitched the tent. The sleeping bags were useless under such a temperature. They did not open them, therefore, and they threw themselves down clothed as they were.

A long, deep sleep kept them still for hours. When they awoke great was their surprise to find that the lake had reappeared, and that the column of water was rising as before to a hundred and fifty feet in height, and breaking into the shower of liquid diamonds.

“Ho! ho!” exclaimed D’Ermont, “I begin to understand. This is an intermittent fountain, a sort of marvellous geyser. The surface it discloses is, owing to the motion of the earth, sometimes above, sometimes below the orifice we see. Hence the regular flow of the water outwards, and its return inwards every twelve hours. The jet of water is certainly due to some additional pressure, and its great height is due to the lesser weight of the air at the Pole than at the Equator.”

This second hypothesis could easily be tested, and it was immediately confirmed by the barometer. To test the first hypothesis, D’Ermont had recourse to a very simple proceeding.

He went to the opposite side of the lake and threw in a branch of a tree which he had previously stripped of its foliage, and marked with a piece of coloured rag.

At first the branch seemed as though it was not going to move.

But in time it gradually moved away from the bank, not in a straight line to the centre, but in a curve which took it in succession through every point of the compass. At the end of six hours the water had disappeared into its bed of mist.

The fifth day had elapsed since leaving their companions on the field of ice. They had only brought a fortnight’s provisions with them, and they had to think of getting back. Hubert repeated with variations La Fontaine’s line,—

“We cannot see all, we mast get out from here.” .

Up to then they had been completely successful. With the exception of a few incidents of detail, incidents more picturesque than disquieting, they had found the road open to them. Now the problem was of exceptional gravity. This land of the Pole, this remarkable island, was situated some four hundred yards above the level of the sea. More than that, the sea encircled it with an impassable mound of waves, and beyond was the rocky barrier under which they had come, by a road they had again to find.

The question was formidable; and its solution had to be set about forthwith.

Their first attempt was to endeavour to drive the boat into the belt of water, so as to mount to the crest and go over it. This failed.

The frail craft of aluminum could not triumph over the resistance of the waters. The gyratory movement of the circle was exercised with the same force on both sides of its line, but on the inner side the boat could not be submerged, owing to a slope of sixty feet, without any liquid support having to be dealt with.

The disappointment was great. At one moment it almost changed to despair.

“Are we doomed to remain imprisoned at the Pole?” asked Isabelle.

She smiled as she said this, but her tone was anxious. “No,” said Hubert, thinking only of reassuring her. “We shall get out all right. But I am sorry we did not bring the balloon with us. The centrifugal force which prevented our reaching the Pole would now be of great use in helping us out of it.”

Two days went by amid these perplexities and anxieties. Every day the lieutenant returned to the border of the lake and looked down into its gloomy depths. His many observations only added to his anxiety. The insects, the butterflies, for instance, were not strong enough in their flight to have come from the distant icy lands that lie around the Pole. It followed that they must have come into existence on the island.

One morning Hubert noticed that the fauna was increased. There were one or two birds he had not seen before. These were large owls such as are found in the mines dug by the hand of man, as well as in the icy deserts of the north. As he watched the flight of one of them he saw the bird-plunge down into the abyss left by the retreat of the waters of the lake. He concluded that the gulf must consist of large cavities sometimes dry, sometimes submerged. He had already discovered that-the water of the lake was not salt.

From that to a plan of escaping from the Pole down through the lake was but a step.

A series of calculations showed him that the plan was not only reasonable but relatively easy of accomplishment.

He and Guerbraz set to work. They took the boat to pieces, and built it up again on the lake shore.

“What are you going to do?” asked Isabelle, curiously. Hubert smiled and explained his plan.

“My dear Isabelle,” said he, “you will see very quickly. The water of this lake is fresh water, which proves that it has no communication with the sea. It takes twelve hours to fill a cavity sixty fathoms deep and a mile across. That shows that an immense subterranean sheet of water must extend round here reaching to at least sixty kilometres away. At every revolution of the earth, this water returns to its point of departure. It sweeps round the compass and consequently it must cross the forty-first degree of west longtitude. We have, therefore, only to descend into the entrails of the earth for this water to take us to the extreme point where it is in communication with the land. We know that the girdle of rocks is about forty kilometres from here and that the surface of our island is a circle of some twenty-five square miles in area. If we let ourselves be borne along by a branch of this underground current we are sure of reaching one of the islands in the open sea. The presence of that sea and the existence of this prodigious amount of magnetic force assures us that the hypothesis is certainly correct.”

He spoke with such conviction that Isabelle was conquered at once.

“Bravo!” she said,” forward, then, by the subterranean corridor.”

It was the eighth day. D’Ermont’s calculations told him that to reach the outer boundary of the underground waters in the vicinity of the forty-first meridian, he must start at noon precisely.

The boat was accordingly launched and the embarkation took place.

As he had expected, the descent of this internal sea took place circularly.

In this way the boat passed round all sides of the gulf.

Down to thirty fathoms the lake was a cylindrical pit, the smooth clean walls of which seemed to have been built in masonry.

But at this depth the well suddenly opened out into a series of tunnels and boundless caves, like those the boat had been through on its voyage under the reef.

Hubert soon saw that his calculations as to the depth were not exact. When he reached the sixty fathoms where he expected to find the bottom, the boat was floating on an immense sheet of water under a rocky vault brilliantly illuminated by electric effluences, while the sounding line showed a depth of two hundred and forty fathoms more.

The truth flashed on the explorers,

The difference in the lake’s level was due to the difference in height between the extreme points of the Pole caused by the inclination of the earth’s axis.

The internal cave emptied and filled according as its position was above or below that axis. This was why the well became lake or precipice according to the time of day.

Being in this way satisfied as to the true state of affairs, Hubert had only to devote his attention to steering the boat into safety.

Up till then they had remained on the surface.

Now the height of the vault overhead and the vast dimensions of the cave permitted them to repeat the manoeuvre they had found answer so well in passing the reefs. All the hatches were shut down, every opening was closed, and the boat sank into the water. But this time it was fresh water through which they had to go.

Fortunately the internal illumination of this fairy grotto, the heat given off by the powerful electric centre, rendered the voyage less fatiguing and less dangerous than the first.

All their fears had ceased but one: that of entering into some passage without an outlet where they would be abandoned by the waves. But Hubert hastened to assure his companions against these chimerical hypotheses. The presence of breathable air at such depths, and even of a certain gentle breeze, showed that there was an atmospheric current in these wonderful tunnels. Besides, their enormous dimensions denoted that they also must be partly emptied at every revolution of the globe.

The three friends joined in a prayer to the Almighty, and, comforted by the Divine Power, boldly entered the subterranean caves.

But this time to their amazement was added a feeling of legitimate terror at meeting with something totally unexpected.

Up to now they had to contend only with the ocean, and the mysterious shadows and phantoms that peopled it. This battle with the inanimate had its dangers undoubtedly, but they had seen nothing of the extraordinary and supernatural with which so much of the life of the seamen is occupied.

Here, in the depths of these limpid waters, they were to meet with many strange apparitions, and with shapes worthy of the most awful nightmares described in teratological legend.

“Captain!” suddenly shouted Guerbraz, beckoning as he did so. “Come and look at this horror!” Hubert and Isabelle rushed to the windows. A monster had just risen out of the shadow of one of the pillars, and was swimming right at the boat. The body was twenty feet long, and provided with fins, or a neck almost as long, ending in a relatively small head, in shape like a lizard’s. Behind this strange specimen of a form that has disappeared for thousands of years were others still larger, half way between a whale and a crocodile, beasts with walrus heads, faceted eyes and saurian teeth.

D’Ermont could not restrain a cry of alarm as well as surprise.

“Mercy on us! The fossils have come to life
!”

And mechanically he began to tell their names and enumerate their species.

“That one with the swan’s neck is the plesiosaurus, that other is an ichthyosaurus. Up there, on the ledge of the rock is a megalosaurus; overhead are whole families of giant dog-fishes, swordfishes, sharks, sawfishes, hammerheads.”

“What will happen to us?” murmured Isabelle.

Matters were indeed becoming alarming. The frail boat was running amid a perfect swarm of the monsters of all ages prior to the quaternary. These had survived the catastrophes of the globe. In these fresh, warm waters in the earth’s interior they had found shelter against the cold on the surface. And the presence of this intruder, this fish in plated armour, inferior in size to many among them, for the boat was not more than forty feet long, had at first astonished them, and had now enraged them.

Grouped around it, forming a sort of tacit line, they advanced in serried ranks to the assault; arid a combined would have shattered the vessel to pieces.

D’Ermont was equal to the occasion. He had recourse to radical measures on the spot.

Assembling in connection all the couples of the battery used in electrically lighting the boat, he put this new kind of voltaic pile in immediate contact with the boat’s outer skin, and for the moment transformed it into a coil of enormous power.

“Look out!” he cried, “and catch hold of the glass handles. We may feel a shock.”

He had not finished speaking when six of the terrible creatures dashed at the boat.

The shock was tremendous. Twenty-two cells coupled up had given the boat a charge powerful enough to knock over a herd of cattle. The monsters did not wait for another shock to pass through them into the whole troop that crowded around as this had done. In a twinkling the army was in flight in all directions.

“It was time,” said Hubert with a sigh of relief. “Heaven be praised! If this had not succeeded, I had only one more chance, and I have my doubts if it would have been of any good.”

“And what was that?” asked Isabelle, still agitated by her emotion.

“I would have put one of oar tubes of liquid hydrogen in contact with the water and opened it suddenly. There would have been a terrific lowering of the temperature, and we should have killed off a respectable number of these rascally things that have had the bad taste to live on to these days.”

While this conversation was in progress the boat was running at full speed away from these dangerous monsters. It had entered a spacious corridor, which it followed along its whole length. For four hours the voyage continued without any perilous incident.

At length, by the gradual diminution of the internal illumination, the explorers perceived that they were emerging from the magnetic zone to enter one less favoured. They had to bring into use again the lights of the boat, and the first rays disclosed that the bed of the water was less than twenty fathoms below them.

The boat emptied her reservoirs and rose to the surface.

It was as Hubert had expected. .

They were afloat on a surface of fresh water of marvellous limpidity in a cavern similar in nearly all respects to that at the Pole. A light, like a ray from a lens, could be seen to the south. Guerbraz steered towards it.

This was the opening into the cave; its communication with the outer air. The waters of the lake there formed in summer a cascade three hundred feet high; but at this time of the year the cold had solidified the upper falls into steps of crystal. Above stretched the wall of ice which formed the outer girdle of the Pole, and below that the open sea was beating against the rocks.

“We are saved!” exclaimed Isabelle.

Assuredly, they were not yet at the end of their dangers and fatigues, and cruel sufferings were still in store for them. But, at least, they had reached their object, and obtained the desired result. They had succeeded in penetrating to the Pole, and had returned, bringing precise information regarding it.