“What do you want to know about it?” he asked absent-mindedly, for he was not a little bit interested in this at the particular moment.
“I wants to know why is the Arctic Circle, and everything else about the bloomin’ thing. The way I’ve doped it out it is like a meridian or the equator, that is, it’s a line that you can’t see and yet it’s there or here just the same. I’m settin’ on it and I know it but I can’t prove it, As man to man, now, I’m askin’ you what is it?” asked Bill with great earnestness.
Jack looked at him and laughed.
“You asked a question and then answered it yourself in the next breath. You’ve said all there is to say about it except that it’s a circle running round the North Pole like an ostrich feather on a lady’s hat, only, different from the latter, it extends on all sides of the pole to latitude sixty-six degrees and thirty-two minutes north.”
“But why is it?” persisted Bill.
Jack thought a moment.
“The chief reason the Arctic Circle is so called is because it is the circle below which the sun does not drop in mid-summer. If we were here on the Arctic Circle in summer we’d see the sun at midnight just above the horizon, and the farther north a person goes in summer the higher he will see the sun above the horizon at midnight. Lots of tourists come up here every summer just to take a look at the midnight sun, and the natives call them sunners.”
“An’ we won’t get to see it then?” kicked Bill; “it’s just my luck. If it ’ud be rainin’ soup I’d be standin’ out in it with a fork.”
“We’re not up here to see the sun at midnight,” Jack came back at him, “we’re lucky if we get a glimpse of it at noon. What we’re up here for is to get the yellow stuff.”
“Oh yes, I kinda lost sight o’ the bloomin’ gold for a minute,” was Bill’s reply.