It is far more easy to reach to high latitudes in the north owing to the comparative mildness of the climate.
The southern summer is shorter and colder than that at the North Pole.
Well, we know a little about the whereabouts of the Magnetic Pole, but the vast interior is still a sealed book.
The climatology of the Antarctic is marvellous, and very puzzling. During the summer, for example, in which we now find our Walrus friends sailing about, the days were often very mild, down along the coast, with its bare brown, black, and yellow earth peeping through the snow, its occasional avalanches of snow, and its sudden transitions from sunshine and warmth to snow-fogs, snow-squalls, and a temperature running down to zero, or below it.
The winds are, to a great extent, accountable for this.
But from the very start of the sledge expedition, or as soon as they got high up on the great tableland of snow, there was little really mild weather, and, despite the sunshine, the surface seldom, if ever, got soft.
The currents are another marvellous study; that is, if they can be studied, which they never can be until stations of observation are established all round the so-called Antarctic continent.
The volcanoes are numerous. As I said before, in these regions the great war between the ice above and the fire beneath the earth’s crust is still going on, and will doubtless go on for millions of years, unless this globe of ours comes into collision with some invisible wandering world—then the heat evolved will melt the two, and creation, as far as these are concerned, will have to commence all over again.
But other marvels have yet to be revealed to us. We want to know something of the buried earth’s crust in these Antarctic regions. We want to find out if possible what species of plants and flowers grew here when the equatorial belt was an uncrossable band of flaming heat; we would like to know something of its buried forests, and even of the extinct animals that roamed therein, in the shape perhaps of dragons fifty to a hundred feet long which inhabited its lakes and its caves on mountain slopes.
There were such creatures, doubtless, at a time long long agone, when this world was almost entirely peopled by monsters which are now relegated, too thoughtlessly, to the realms of the mythological.