“Listen,” he said, and he waved his hands, inviting us to a closer attention; his voice fell; I thought his peering eyes glanced to either side to avert the proximity of eavesdroppers. “There is good reason to believe that this new world of the north is neither inclement nor barren. I believe it is a place of wonders; in it rest secrets, REVELATIONS.” There was now a sorcery in the Professor’s voice that made us lean toward him, drawing the circle a little closer, like conspirators over an incantation. “What they are no once can tell. You ask, Why? I believe this. I can hardly explain; my faith in this is a growth, a coalescence of many strands of feeling and many lines of study. My conviction is complete. I admit that extrinsically, as I may say, it is unreasonable; intrinsically it is now as inexpugnable as a theorem from Euclid, or the evidence of my own senses.
“That there is a new world south of the pole is maintained by Science; it is the unalterable belief of the explorers, the hydrographers, the geographers. But what may that world be like? What was it like? Long millions and millions of years before our time the Arctic north was the procreant cradle of ALL LIFE! From it streamed the currents of animal and vegetable creation; it was warm; forests of palms flourished along river and lake-side, and within them roamed the creatures of tropical or semi-tropical climates. Paleontologists from Saporta to Wieland, from Keerl to Heer have pointed this out, with an emphasis that has varied with temperament or knowledge, from conviction to surmise. G. Hilton Scribner, a clever American litterateur says”—the Professor ludicrously grasped for something in an inner coat pocket and revealed a little book, exquisitely bound, of scraps and extracts, and read from a page whose smoothness he had marred by folding a leaf—“he says, ‘thus the Arctic zone, which was earliest in cooling down to the first and highest heat degree in the great life-gamut was also the first to become fertile, first to bear life, and first to send forth her progeny over the earth.’
“And Wieland, a remarkable Yale scholar, an authority on fossil cycads and Chelonia, the latest to speculate authoritatively along this line, writes”—another creased page was turned to—“‘in a word, that the great evolutionary Schauplatz was boreal is possible from the astronomical relations, probable from physical facts, and rendered an established certainty by the unheralded synchronous appearance of the main groups of animals and plants on both sides of the great oceans throughout post-Paleozoic time.’”
“But Professor,” it was my remonstrance that now interrupted him, “that was millions of years ago. It’s a dead world up there. Surely you don’t think—”
The Professor broke in with a deprecatory gesture of regret at his own impatience. “I know. True, true, for the most part, but perhaps not for all—not for all. It’s a deep matter.”
Professor Bjornsen’s eyes were glistening with enthusiasm; his manner became extravagantly mysterious, and his words boiled out feverishly from his scarred lips. “The north, to whose enchantment the whole world bows; a strange, magical region, lit by the supernal splendors of heavenly lights, and wrapped in eternal snows, was the Eden of our race. It was that navel of the world related in all mythologies from India to Greece, from Japan to Scandinavia; it was the Paradisaic earth center, the fecund source of every manner of life, endowed by the Creator with original unrestrained powers of exuberance. Here man originated; here was his primal home, here his first estate, dressed as he was in every faculty of mind, and enriched by all the gifts of nature. As President Warren, another American, eloquently wrote twenty-six years ago—”
Again the Professor dove into his pocket, produced his amazing little scrapbook, while we all gazed at the excited gentleman with a new fascination and astonishment. Here was the man of crystals and mensuration, of ores, adits, drifts and strata, riding the high horse of mystical and religious analogy, and somehow we felt ourselves drawn into the vortex of his cerebral excitement! We were quite dazed in a way, and yet felt an elation that kept us spellbound.
“Ah, here it is. He wrote, President Warren, ‘the pole symbolizes Cardo, Atlas, Meru, Hara-berezaiti, Kharsak-Kurra, every fabulous mountain on whose top the sky pivots itself, and around which all the heavenly bodies ceaselessly revolve.’
“Assume this; assume that here the finger of God first impressed this insensate whirling globe of unconscious matter with the touch and promise of life and Mind. Is it likely that all vestiges, all signs, all remainders of that consecrated first endowment should have quite disappeared, succumbed ingloriously to the stiffening embrace of cold, congealed in an eternal sleep beneath the glaciers and the snows? I think not, my friends, I think not.”
“But,” it was the protesting voice of Goritz who now voiced our incredulity, “haven’t the expeditionists, the geographers, the explorers—hasn’t everything we have been told, everything we have read, all we know about it, and that’s a good deal, from Franklin to Peary made it clear that at the pole there is nothing but death, desolation, and ice?”