When J. T. Maston learnt from Evangelina that the mystery of Kilimanjaro had been cleared up by a telegram from Zanzibar,—
“Pshaw!” he said, making a wonderful zigzag in the air with his iron hook. “They do not travel yet by telegraph or telephone; and in six days—patarapatanboomboom—all will be ready!”
And any one who heard the secretary of the Gun Club deliver the sonorous onomatope, like a roar from a Columbiad, would have wondered at the amount of vital energy remaining in the old artilleryman.
But there was no doubt that he was right. There was no time to send messengers to the Wamasai to arrest Impey Barbicane. Even if the messengers started from Egypt, or Aden, or Massowah, or Zanzibar, however quickly they might travel, they would have to contend with the difficulties of the country, with the obstacles unavoidable on a road through a mountainous region, and probably with followers acting under the orders of a sultan as despotic as he was black.
All hope would have to be given up of stopping the operation or arresting the operator.
But, if that was impossible, nothing was easier now than to know the worst that could happen. The firing-point had been revealed, and it was a simple matter of calculation—a complicated calculation evidently, but not beyond the capacities of algebraists in particular and mathematicians in general.
At first the Government kept the despatch secret, their object being to be able to indicate when they published it what would be the results of the displacement of the axis with regard to the alteration in the level of the waters. The inhabitants of the world would then know the fate that was in store for them, according to the segment of the spheroid on which they resided.
On the 14th of September the telegram was sent to the Longitudes Office at Washington, with instructions to work out the final consequences, ballistic and geographical. The next day but one the information was ready. It was cabled at once to all the Governments of the new and old worlds, and having been printed in thousands of newspapers, it was cried in all the great cities by all the newsboys of the globe, as—
“What is going to happen?”
Which was the question being asked in every language just then.