Pike then took a piece of the rock weighing about five pounds, and placing one end of it in the midst of a handful of smaller pieces, ranging from the size of a pea to that of a hulled walnut, the whole mass of small fragments was lifted up and remained clinging to the larger lump of rock.
“See that!” cried Pike, glancing at one and another of the men about him: “What did I tell you? and there is millions more where I got this!”
All were now really a good deal interested in the rock found by Pike, and in the powerful magnetic qualities it exhibited, as the large lumps would pick up and hold suspended fragments weighing over an ounce.
“The way I come to find it,” now explained Pike, “was this: I found the big ledge of black, heavy rock, and taking up a chunk of it began trying to break off a slice from the main ledge. As I hammered away, I noticed that all the little bits of rock pounded loose stuck to the chunk I held in my hand. I thought at first that there was pine-gum on the chunk, but could find none, then it all at once flashed into my mind, and I said—‘I’ve struck it! This is the stuff they make compasses of!’ Then you just ought to have seen me make tracks down the mountain.”
“We saw you!” said the men.
Pike then went on to say, that his discovery was one of the most important, in many respects, that had been made in modern times. It would be of incalculable advantage to navigation and would increase the navies of the world a thousand-fold. He even went so far the next morning (which showed that his brain had not been idle during the night) as to assert that hereafter there would be no difficulty about reaching the North Pole. All that would be necessary, he said, would be to place a block of about ten tons of his rock on the bow of a ship, when, without the aid of sail or rudder, and in spite of adverse winds and ice-floes, the vessel would plough its way up through the oceans of the north and never stop until its nose rested against the side of the Pole.
Pike had several assays of his “find” made, and it was weeks before he could be made to believe that it was not something of more value than magnetic iron ore.
Some years after Pike’s great discovery, a prospector who had been roaming through the Pahranagat Mountains, the wildest and most sterile portion of southeastern Nevada, brought back with him a great curiosity in the shape of a number of traveling stones. The stones were almost perfectly round, the majority of them as large as a hulled walnut, and very heavy, being of an irony nature. When scattered about on the floor, on a table, or other level surface, within two or three feet of each other, they immediately began traveling toward a common centre, and then huddled up in a bunch like a lot of eggs in a nest. A single stone removed to a distance of a yard, upon being released, at once started off with wonderful and somewhat comical celerity to rejoin its fellows; but if taken away four or five feet it remained motionless.
The man who was in possession of these traveling stones said that he found them in a region of country that, though comparatively level, is nothing but bare rock. Scattered about in this rocky plain are a great number of little basins, from a few feet to two or three rods in diameter, and it is in the bottom of these basins that the rolling stones are found. In the basins they are seen from the size of a pea to five or six inches in diameter. These curious pebbles appeared to be formed of loadstone[loadstone] or magnetic iron ore.