“That’s most unlikely, Conseil.”
“If master will allow me to finish, I mean that if this phenomenon occurs, it might prove distressing to Mr. de Lesseps, who has gone to such pains to cut through his isthmus!”
“Agreed, but I repeat, Conseil: such a phenomenon won’t occur. The intensity of these underground forces continues to diminish. Volcanoes were quite numerous in the world’s early days, but they’re going extinct one by one; the heat inside the earth is growing weaker, the temperature in the globe’s lower strata is cooling appreciably every century, and to our globe’s detriment, because its heat is its life.”
“But the sun—”
“The sun isn’t enough, Conseil. Can it restore heat to a corpse?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
“Well, my friend, someday the earth will be just such a cold corpse. Like the moon, which long ago lost its vital heat, our globe will become lifeless and unlivable.”
“In how many centuries?” Conseil asked.
“In hundreds of thousands of years, my boy.”
“Then we have ample time to finish our voyage,” Conseil replied, “if Ned Land doesn’t mess things up!”