"What is it now?" I called, leaning over the rail.
At a glance I saw that the nature of the country had changed. No more skeletons; no more sand and rocks, or arid desert, but a great sheet of water lay to our right, while below and beyond were trees and fields, which looked as if they were cultivated; and here and there, at intervals of a mile or two, were undoubtedly the walls of human habitations. I do not say they were houses, for houses have roofs, whereas these edifices were roofless.
"I am sure I have discovered houses," said Torrence; "and I am trying to see if there are any people!"
I took the glass from his hand.
"There is no doubt about it," I exclaimed; "and what is more, they do not appear to be ruins, but houses in perfect repair, judging from their similarity and the condition of the grounds around them. But what kind of climate must these people enjoy to require no roofs? Certainly it can never rain!"
"Nor snow!" he added with a smile.
"What made you think of snow?"
"I thought, perhaps, you were thinking of it," he replied.
"Why?"
"Because you said it was high time we were in the ice belt again!"
I started.
"And how far have we come?" I asked.
"From where?"
He looked carefully at his register and made a calculation. He then said:
"We are now one thousand three hundred and eighty miles from Von Broekhuysen's Island, and about one thousand one hundred and thirty miles north of the North Pole – if you can imagine such a thing – I mean that we have advanced upon a straight line for this distance; and as you see, we have met neither ice, snow, nor cold weather yet!"
I looked above. The great disk of light was still bright in the heavens; I thought a little nearer the zenith than before. Unless there had been some gross miscalculation in our speed we had got to face a physical problem of the most stupendous nature. A problem so appalling that I began to dread the explanation as much as I had recently sought it.
"Yes," I answered in a weak voice, "there is certainly neither ice nor snow here!"
"Nor cold!" added Torrence.
"Nor cold!" I admitted.
"Nor undue heat!" he continued.
"Certainly not. The temperature has been perfect."
"And the air has a vitality unknown to us in the old world," he pursued.
"I grant every word you say. This may be a dream, but it is a paradise!"
"It is not a dream!" cried Torrence; "it is another world; a world within our own. Yonder disk of light in the sky is the opening at the pole through which we have sailed. The earth is a hollow globe, with an opening at each pole, through which the sunlight always enters. For six months it comes through the northern opening, and for six months through the southern. But the change is gradual. With the advent of the southern day, the disk is in the south, fading imperceptibly as the northern light supplants it, and vice versa. The great aurora borealis which illumines the Arctic regions of our world is simply the sunlight pouring through from the southern hemisphere, or the light which enters the earth at the South Pole, discharging itself at the north. For ages our world was believed to be flat; but time and study proved the fallacy. In the days of Hipparchus and Ptolemy, and for centuries after it was believed that the sun revolved around the earth; what a stupendous change in man's knowledge when the opposite was found to be the case. From the days of Columbus to our own – with a few notable exceptions – the world was supposed to be filled with amass of molten material; but within recent years facts observed in the boiling of water have compelled men to abandon that theory and substitute that of a world solid to the core. One by one the theories which have stood on the bed rock of science and been held as irrefutable by the wisdom of the age, have crumbled to pieces, and been supplanted by others; and now the faith in a solid earth is to be shattered, for you and I know that it is hollow – light and inhabited. But let us see what small beginnings led to the change in men's views in the past, and observe how similar they are to those operating now – "
"What!" I interrupted, "do you mean to say that we have sailed through an opening at the pole, and are now in the interior of the earth?"
"That is exactly it," answered Torrence.
"I can't comprehend such a thing. What is the diameter of this opening; and where is the North Pole?"
"The North Pole has no existence except as an imaginary point in space, at least five hundred miles from the surface of the earth. The openings at the so-called poles are more than a thousand miles in diameter, admitting the light of the sun and holding it with a denser and more highly electrified atmosphere than our own, making perpetual daylight, for, as I have told you, when the sun crosses the line, its light is derived through the opening at the opposite pole. The frozen belt surrounding each of these openings mark the regions of the verge, and the distance across this ring is about fifteen hundred miles.
"But the polar regions are declared to be slightly flattened."
"That is because men have penetrated far enough into the verge to mark the change in the earth's convexity, but not far enough to perceive that they had actually begun to enter the sphere itself. But I am coming to that presently. I wish to show you why certain men, in advance of their time, have believed that the earth was a hollow globe, luminous and desirable for man's abode, as we now know it to be; and how, as in some of the greatest discoveries of the past these views have been based on the study of facts as we find them, and not upon theories, which distort facts to maintain themselves. About the year 1470, a Portuguese sailor by the name of Vicente found a piece of curiously carved wood more than a thousand miles to the west of Algarve, a province of southern Portugal. This relic was discovered after a westerly gale of long duration. It set the fellow thinking. It also set Christopher Columbus thinking. Another mariner, by the name of Correa had observed certain flotsam and jetsam under similar circumstances, and was impressed by the fact. Then there was the belief in the mysterious islands of St. Brandam; and nearly 8 thousand miles west of the Canaries was supposed to be the lost island of the Seven Cities, upon which theme you remember Irving's charming story, 'The Adalantado of the Seven Cities.' These and a few other facts led Columbus to stake his life and fortune in sailing into the unknown West for the new world. I now want to show you some of the reasons for believing in a hollow, habitable globe, and to ask if they are not equally as strong as those which guided Columbus."
I was astounded, dazed, and stood trembling by the taffrail, while Torrence proceeded.
XVI
* * * * *
"Do not be appalled by our discovery," he continued; "it is as simple and natural as that which proved the earth a sphere, when the wisdom of the ages had declared it flat. The old arguments against its rotundity were quite as potent as any ever brought to refute the theory of a hollow globe, first advanced by Captain Symmes. How could the earth be round? Would not all the water run off on the underside? The thing was absurd. 'How could the world be hollow and habitable? Would not the inside be dark? and would not the water drop from the upper to the lower half?' Why does not the moon drop? The land and water above us are so distant, and so screened by the atmosphere as to be invisible even if we were thousands of miles above our present position. The center of gravity lies somewhere within the crust, which is probably nowhere more than a hundred miles thick.
"The inner world is better in every way than the outer. The climate is more uniform and temperate. The electrical conditions of the atmosphere more conducive to longevity and health, and the struggle for existence far less than with us. Here are some of the arguments in favor of a hollow globe, which the so-called wise men have ignored. The uniform migration of herrings to the south. Whence come they, if not from the interior of the earth, for they are never known to return? The assumption is that in search of their food supplies they constantly advance against an opposing current, which takes them through the earth, from pole to pole.
"Arctic explorers have observed in the long night of the polar regions that the north star rises to the zenith at a certain latitude, and then declines over the stern of their vessels as they advance further northward, which is directly in contradiction to what it should do, had they not already reached the verge and begun to pass inward toward the interior. This in itself should be a convincing fact. The Aurora Borealis has never been explained satisfactorily, but you and I know its meaning. Strange plants and birds unknown to our world have from time to time been found upon our most northern shores. As I have already told you, the reindeer of Spitzbergen are marked by the hand of man, but what man no one knows, as the island is uninhabited, and as they could not have come from the south, they must have crossed the ice from some undiscovered country to the north.
"Almost all of the civilized nations have from time to time expended large sums of money in determining the figure of the earth. Arcs of the meridian have been measured again and again; and observations of the pendulum, as well as weight experiments, have been made to determine the force of terrestrial gravity in different localities. The result of these experiments has been to prove that the bulk of the earth, as determined by gravity, differs greatly from the result reached by measurement. This discrepancy has never been satisfactorily accounted for, nor can it ever be, with the present view of the earth's interior, but with Symmes' theory of a hollow globe, as we know it, could be easily explained. But I am coming to still more extraordinary data.
"In the early part of this century two human corpses were found incased in on iceberg, which had presumably floated down from the eastern coast of Greenland. The bodies were perfectly preserved, and clothed in garments entirely different, both in design and material, from those worn by the Esquimaux, or any known race of people. Beyond this, neither the form, shape of skull, or color of skin resembled that of any nationality with which we are familiar. Their discovery created quite a sensation at the time, but as no clew was ever established to their identity, the circumstance was gradually forgotten. Might not these men have been daring explorers, dwellers of the inner earth, and wandering beyond the possibility of return, been lost in the ice and so preserved, perhaps, for centuries?
"About twenty years ago, one Niack Dolê, a Norwegian whaler, discovered in a block of field ice, after a northerly gale of many days' duration, an extraordinary animal, differing from any which he or any of his companions had ever seen before. The little creature was carried home at the end of the voyage, and although thousands of men of experience, and travelers from many parts of the world, saw and examined it, it was impossible to class it with any known species.
"In the year 1855 four wild men were found by some sailors on the ice to the north of Cape Tchelyieskin, in the Tamyr Peninsula, Siberia. They could give no account of themselves, as no one could understand their language. They were cared for, and visited by many people and afterward sent to St. Petersburg where strangers from all parts of the world saw them; but not a single individual was ever able to communicate with them except through the language of signs. They all died within two years of their discovery, and the only established fact concerning them seemed to be that they came from somewhere across the frozen sea to the north, where they had always lived. In appearance these men were unlike any we know. They understood each other perfectly, had a racial resemblance, were fairly intelligent, and would doubtless have mastered the language spoken around them had they lived long enough.
"You may say that this is all very well to show that there is an unknown continent somewhere about the pole, but that it has no bearing on the hollow globe. But the arguments in favor of that I have already shown you from an astronomical, geographical, meteorological and scientific point of view, and yet there is one more I wish to present, which in my opinion is profound and unanswerable.
"In the transit of Venus observations are taken at various points upon the earth's surface. The path which Venus describes across the disk of the sun varies with the position of the observer, so also does the angle of her axis vary with that position. The projection of Venus against the sun occurs when she is at her inferior conjunction, and approaching either node. The node is one of the points where the orbit of a planet intercepts the ecliptic, or the orbit of its primary. In this condition the body of Venus will appear as a dark spot crossing the disk of the sun. Now, in the last transit of Venus, two gentlemen of great ability – Herr Von Pultzner, and an American by the name of Breslyne observed it from a point quite remote from all others. I will give you the exact locality of their observation later, and the reason of their choosing it. I am not going to bother you with scientific terms, but will merely say that when the dark body of Venus was interposed between the earth and the sun, an extraordinary phenomenon presented itself to these men – a phenomenon entirely different from that seen by any other observer. In the center of the planet was a brilliant point of light, around which the opaque substance of the star was visible. Von Pultzner and Breslyne examined this light carefully, and identified it with sunlight. To be concise, they perceived that they were looking directly through Venus at the sun. There was no disputing the fact – the light was analyzed and proved identical with sunlight, the same as that beyond the dark circumference of the planet. These men – both of whom I know to be intelligent and truthful – looked at each other in amazement.
"'We have made a most astounding discovery,' said one.
"'It is nothing less than that Venus has a hole through her center, from pole to pole,' answered the other.
"'Yes, and a thousand times more,' continued the first, 'for if Venus is a hollow sphere, all the planets are hollow.'
"This I know to be a fact, and yet, because unsupported by better evidence – I mean the evidence of professional astronomers – the testimony of these men was turned aside."
"And why should all the planets be hollow because Venus is hollow?" I inquired.
"Because it is inconceivable that they were not brought into existence and formed by the same law. An hypothesis which accounts for the formation of Mars or Venus upon one theory, and that of the earth upon another, would never be countenanced by science. The solar system was the result of law, of unalterable and immutable law, working for manifestation. It could not produce a solid globe in the one instance and a hollow sphere in the other. No – all the planets are hollow – the earth is a mere bubble floating in space. And now I want to ask if the evidence I had accumulated was not equal to that which fired Columbus?"
"Why did you not tell me all this before we started?" I inquired.
"Because, being an average man, you would have discarded it, as other very wise and average men have done before. You would have taken me for a fool, and left me in the lurch. But we are here at last, and my dream is true. We now know that the earth is hollow, bright, and habitable."
I was dumfounded at the awful significance of our discovery. If I had suddenly found myself a visitor upon the planet Mars, through some newly devised means of transportation, my bewilderment could have been no greater. Not only was the evidence overwhelming that the earth was hollow and open at the poles, but the fact had been established by the testimony of our own senses.
We were in that world, and there could be no further speculation regarding its existence.
* * * * *
"Beyond all that I have told you," continued Torrence, "Arctic explorers have observed the crescent-shaped cloud which we saw above the northern horizon, and which is simply the opposite side of the verge across the polar opening. Few navigators venturing beyond the eighty-second parallel have failed to observe this phenomenon."
* * * * *
"Now I have told you some of the most potent causes which influenced Symmes and others in the adoption of this belief; but there are other reasons, quite as forceful, not necessary to enumerate at present, as we should be on the lookout for wonders ahead."
Passing beyond the shores of the lake we entered a rolling country, watered by a broad river with numerous minor tributaries. The course of this stream proved the same as our own for quite a distance.
* * * * *
The small roofless houses were again observed, and we thought they were possibly the huts of herders, as occasional glimpses of animals were to be had in the distance.
* * * * *
Tracing the course of this river for more than a hundred miles we encountered a sight that thrilled us to the core of our beings.
* * * * *
Sailing on the quiet water below was a ship of unknown build. In the most romantic imagining of fairy tale this vessel could never have been surpassed. Slightly resembling the Pinta and Santa Maria, she suggested them, but the likeness was not sustained on closer examination. She was of greater beam and depth, and of loftier bow and stern. Her prow rose to unusual height, receding gracefully, and again projecting outward in a superb figurehead in the form of a swan, whose beak was gilded, and whose head and neck were set with jewels in laminated gold.
* * * * *
The masts were short, two in number, and placed upon each side of the deck, instead of down the center as with us. Stretched horizontally across from mast to mast was a sail of many colors. It possessed a sheen transcending that of the finest silk and was striped perpendicularly. The masts were gilded and set with jewels. Wherever we looked the ornamentation was extreme and extended to every detail. Colored sparks flashed from remote and unexpected corners, where gem-like stones were set, and the vessel glowed and burned and blazed with creeping fires as of scintillating phosphorescence of green, yellow, red and gold.
But this was not all. There were living creatures upon the deck clothed in the soft undulations of watered silk. No Eastern potentate, or denizen of Aladdin's palace, was ever half so gorgeously attired, as the passengers aboard this extraordinary craft. The flash of powdered mica on cloaks of transparent fineness produced the impression of liquid glass. The headgear was high, and terminated in a point like a cornucopia, and ornamented with odd designs, fore and aft, in precious stones. Some in green, like emeralds, others blue, like sapphires; while what appeared to be rubies, diamonds, and gold flashed among them in dazzling profusion. On no theatrical stage had I ever seen such a sight, and we hovered low to take in the singular scene.
Naturally, we caused great excitement among those on board, who pointed up at us, shouting in a tongue unlike any we had ever heard. One old man who had a long, gray beard plaited in three strands, each strand held together by half a dozen jeweled rings, seemed particularly anxious to communicate with us, and made signals for us to descend. But Torrence thought it safest to remain above, and so we simply looked down upon them from an elevation of about sixty feet, adjusting our speed to that of their vessel. We realized more than ever that we had entered another world, for a more strangely fantastic scene was impossible to imagine. The wildest consternation reigned on board while we remained in sight, and Torrence waved a white cloth, and made signals to show that we were friendly. We embraced one another, and extended our arms toward them as an indication of brotherly love, and we had to convince them with some difficulty that the air ship was not alive. It was evident that they did not understand flying machines in the new world.
We hovered above this strange vessel for more than an hour, exchanging signals, and endeavoring to communicate; but, finding it quite as impossible to impart information, as to acquire it, we waved them a farewell, took a snapshot with the kodak, and lifting ourselves high above, swept onward upon our journey.
The mysterious craft was soon out of sight, and we hurried forward, following the sinuosities of the river, about a hundred and fifty feet above its surface. As we sat looking out upon its beautiful shores, and the exquisite country beyond, meditating upon the marvels that had befallen us, I almost doubted my bodily existence. The revelation had been too profound and stupendous to be credited in so short a time.
"Is this thing real, or is it a vision of death?" I inquired, turning on my brother suddenly.
"I am not surprised at your asking," he replied; "I have been afraid to tell you the truth of our discovery before, although I have known it and believed in it for years. Merrick's story only confirmed me in my own views."
"And have you never felt a doubt as to the result of the enterprise?"
"Scarcely; the arguments were too strong in favor of the hollow globe for me to have any serious misgiving. But long before I spoke to you I was absolutely convinced. By the distance we had traveled. By the genial climate. By the strange light. By the crescent cloud. By the absence of recurring cold, and by the accumulated knowledge already mentioned. My dear boy, I fully appreciate what a shock this must be to you – even greater than it is to me, and for the reason that I have studied the question and believed in it half my life. For fifteen years I have been convinced that if I could ever find a way across the Palæocrystic Sea I should be able to sail without difficulty into the interior of the earth. There is really nothing more stupendous in this acquisition to our knowledge than was that of the spherical globe to the ancients. When a race of people has been bred for thousands of years to believe that the world they inhabit is flat, it must seem wildly absurd to be suddenly confronted with a theory which advances the possibility of their being able to walk upon the under side of it. Think of such a statement being made to sensible men!"
"And how do you account for the fact that these people have never found their way into the outer world?" I asked.
"For the same reason that we have never found our way into theirs," replied Torrence. "The difficulties of crossing the ice belt are very nearly insurmountable; and yet that they are not quite so we have seen in the case of Jan von Broekhuysen and his two companions. Neither is it by any means certain that dwellers of this inner region have never reached us. Remember the wild men discovered off Cape Tchelyieskin. Where did they come from? Beyond this there are isolated cases of communities that point to unknown regions in the far north, as well as the far south, as their hailing place. These have traditions of having once inhabited a land of more genial climate, and affording better conditions for the human race than ours, and moreover, a land where day was eternal! True, it may not be once in thousands of years that the ice barrier has been threaded, but what is more to the point, it is probable that those who have crossed it did not know it. The change is so gradual, the mind so fixed in its normal conception of the earth's character, that only a few eccentric, or peculiarly educated persons, among the very few who may have accomplished the feat, ever suspected it. There was a time in the world's history when one might have circumnavigated the earth without a suspicion that he had done so."
We now took our meals invariably on deck, not wishing to miss any of the strange and beautiful scenery constantly passing. On one occasion, while preparing some food in the galley, I was struck by what appeared to be a secret panel in the wall. Asking Torrence about it, he said:
"Push it up one inch, and then down two. Then if you press it gently inward it will slide open of itself."
I did so, and found that the aperture contained ten small canvas bags, in each of which, as Torrence told me, were a thousand English sovereigns.
"And what on earth have you brought this amount of coin here for?" I inquired in amazement.
Torrence simply said:
"Because I thought we might need it before we got home again. Gold talks, you know, and we may be able to communicate with these people through its medium. Gold is current throughout our world, and I wanted to see if it were good here. If it is valuable we may not expect to find any very abnormal deposits; if not, look out for a bonanza, provided the air ship holds together, so that we can carry it out with us. I have my theory about it."
"And what is that?" I asked.
"Why simply that our little stock of sovereigns won't buy bread enough for a square meal!" he answered.