Page:Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 06.djvu/43

"Get within the eighty-fourth parallel, beyond which no explorer has yet gone!"

"We will get beyond it!"

"Go to the Pole itself!"

"We are going there!"

And in listening to the president of the Gun Club making these cool answers, talking with such assurance, expressing his opinion so haughtily and unmistakably, the most obstinate began to hesitate. They felt they were in the presence of a man who had lost nothing of his former qualities; calm, cool, with a mind eminently serious and concentrated, exact as a chronometer, adventurous, and bringing the most practical ideas to bear on the most daring undertakings. Solid, morally and physically, he was "deep in the water," to employ a metaphor of Napoleon's, and could hold his own against wind or tide. His enemies and rivals knew that only too well.

He had stated that he would reach the North Pole! He would set foot where no human foot had been set before. He would hoist the Stars and Stripes on one of the two spots of earth which remained immovable while all the rest spun around in diurnal rotation!

Here was a chance for the caricaturists! In the windows of the shops and kiosks of the great cities of Europe and America there appeared thousands of sketches and prints displaying Impey Barbicane seeking the most extravagant means of attaining his object.

Here the daring American, assisted by all the members of the Gun Club, pickaxe in hand, was driving a submarine tunnel through masses of ice, which was to emerge at the very point of the axis.

Here Barbicane, accompanied by J. T. Maston—a very good portrait—and Captain Nicholl, descended in a balloon on the point in question, and, after unheard-of dangers, succeeding in capturing a lump of coal weighing half a pound, which was all the circumpolar deposit contained.

Here J. T. Maston, who was as popular as Barbicane with the caricaturists, had been seized by the magnetic attraction of the Pole, and was fast held to the ground by his metal hook.

And it may be remarked here that the celebrated calculator was of too touchy a temperament to laugh at any jest at his personal peculiarities. He was very much annoyed at it, and it will be easily imagined that Mrs. Scorbitt was not the last to share in his just indignation.

Another sketch, in the Brussels Magic Lantern, represented Impey Barbicane and his co-directors working in the midst of flames, like so many incombustible salamanders. To melt the ice of the Palæocrystic Sea, they had poured over it a sea of alcohol, and then lighted the spirit, so as to convert the polar basin into a bowl of punch. And, playing on the word punch, the Belgian designer had had the irreverence to represent the president of the Gun Club as a ridiculous punchinello.

But of all the caricatures, that which obtained the most success was published by the Parisian Charivari under the signature of "Stop." In the stomach of a whale, comfortably furnished and padded, Impey Barbicane and J. T. Maston sat smoking and playing chess, waiting their arrival at their destination. The new Jonahs had not hesitated to avail themselves of an enormous marine mammifer, and by this new mode of locomotion had passed under the ice-floes to reach the inaccessible Pole.

The phlegmatic president was not in the least incommoded by this intemperance of pen and pencil. He let the world talk, and sing, and parody, and caricature; and he quietly went on with his work.

As soon as he had obtained the concession, he had issued an appeal to the public for the subscription of fifteen millions of dollars in hundred-dollar shares. Such was the credit of Barbicane & Co., that applications flowed in wholesale. But it is as well to say that nearly all the applications came from the United States.

"So much the better!" said the supporters of the North Polar Practical Assoiation. "The work will be entirely American."

The prospectus was so plausible, the speculators believed so tenaciously in the realization of its promises, and admitted so imperturbably the existence of the Polar coal-mines, that the capital was subscribed three times over.

Two-thirds of the applications were declined with regret, and on the 16th of December the capital of fifteen millions of dollars was fully paid up. It was about thrice as much as the amount subscribed for the Gun Club when they made their great experiment of sending a projectile from the Earth to the Moon.

Not only had Barbicane announced that he would attain his object—and now the capital at his command enabled him to reach it without hindrance—but he would certainly not have appealed for funds if he were not certain of success.

The North Pole was at last to be conquered by the audacious genius of man!

Barbicane and his co-directors had the means of succeeding where so many others had failed. They would do what had not been done by Franklin, Kane, Nares, or Greely. They would advance beyond the eighty-fourth parallel. They would take possession of the vast portion of the globe that had fallen to them under the hammer. They would add to the American flag the forty-third star for the forty-third state annexed to the American Confederation.

"Rubbish!" said the European delegates.

And the means of conquering the Pole—means that were practical, logical, indisputable, and of a simplicity quite infantine—were the suggestions of J. T. Maston. It was in his brain,, where ideas were cooked in cerebral matter in a state of constant ebullition, that there had been conceived this great geographical work, and the means devised of bringing it to a successful issue.

The secretary of the Gun Club was a remarkable calculator. The solution of the most complicated problems of mathematical science was but sport to him. He laughed at difficulties, whether in the science of magnitudes, that is algebra, or in the science of numbers, that is arithmetic; and it was a treat to see him handle the symbols, the conven-