With the first rays of the sun peeping over the horizon, the caravan broke camp. Carl was amazed at the speed with which the camels were saddled or loaded, the tents folded away, and the caravan gotten on its way, accompanied by the singing of the guides and the jingle of the lead-camel’s bells.
Thinking of Sana, he recalled of the manuscript he had taken with him.
He would have the whole day to himself, with nothing to do, so he took it from his pocket to read. The manuscript, written in a careful hand, was entitled, “The Conception of Our Universe.”
Two hundred years before Christ, the great mathematician Archimedes said, “Give me a fulcrum and I will move the earth!”
Our earth is a huge ball, about eight thousand miles in diameter and it weighs some six hundred trillion or sextillion tons. (To remember this place twenty-one ciphers after the six—6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.) It is composed of rock, sand and water. Seventy-three per cent., or about three-quarters, of the earth is water—the balance, twenty-seven per cent., or about one-quarter, is solid matter, that is, rock or sand.
The entire surface of the earth measures nearly two hundred million square miles and in contents the earth is about two hundred and sixty billion cubic miles.
The earth is covered with a thin envelope of air and clouds which travels with the earth. If such was not the case, a balloon rising in Europe could stay up three hours, and without moving from its position, land in North America. Furthermore, if the air blanket did not travel with the earth, it is probable that the earth would burn up, since the friction between the earth’s surface and the air would develop great heat, a heat in which nothing could live.
The earth traveling in a magnetic field like that of a huge dynamo, speeds around its own imaginary axis, which lies at an angle of 23½ degrees, once in twenty-four hours. This is at a speed, when one stands at the Equator, say in North Africa, of more than a thousand miles per hour, whereas a few feet from the poles, the speed is not more than nineteen feet in twenty-four hours.
As it whirls around itself, the earth rushes through space in orbital motion, in an easterly direction around the sun, at a velocity of eighteen and a half miles per second, or six hundred and sixty-six thousand miles per hour, a speed that is about fifty times as great as that of the swiftest cannon ball. We earth people are entirely unconscious of this motion, since it is perfectly steady and without a jar.