“Antoine!” Here the Professor turned abruptly to the big Dane, thrusting his umbrageous crown of red hair almost into the thin locks of his friend, and whispered hoarsely, “Ah! Antoine, the secrets are hidden in that uncharted land beyond the ice packs north of Point Barrow. The reservations of life are there. You have all heard,” the rufous glory now moved towards Hopkins and myself, “of Symmes Hole? Of course you shrug your shoulders; it was preternatural simplicity you say, the mad dream of a fool, uproariously derided. Yes! Symmes was not a fool; he was a brave man, a soldier, chasing a reality through the distortions of an hallucination. There is no hole; the earth is not hollow, but—there is a depression; there must be. The depression is at the North Pole somewhere. It has not been found, and the Arctic seas have been parcourired by explorers, as you notice, Goritz. The depression is Krocker Land. If profound its climate is temperate. Life, the remnants of its first evolutionary phases, may be there—but mark me!” The Professor positively dilated, everything in him enlarged as if his bounding heart sent fuller currents of blood to all its outposts; his eyes were refulgent; I thought they were an emerald green; his hair rose in the thrill of his vaticination and his mouth opened into a vast exclamatory rictus, in which flashed his big white incisors like diminutive tusks. “Mark me, there too will be found the last evolutionary phases of the human race!”
Here was a climax, and the mental stupefaction of the Professor’s audience was exactly reflected in the prolonged silence that ensued. It was entertaining, however, to watch Spruce Hopkins’ fixed, expressionless perusal of the Professor’s face, and the immobile glory in the Professor’s answering stare. Hopkins spoke first:
“Well! I like your certainty about that depression, Prof. Can’t see it noway. You’re making things interesting enough, but surely that depression isn’t the gospel truth. Is it?”
The Professor relaxed; he laughed, and his laugh was the most curious blend of a chuckle and a whistle, utterly impossible to describe except by reproduction. It always affected Hopkins hilariously; he said the two elements in the Professor’s laugh were satisfaction and astonishment; the chuckle meant the first, the whistle the second, and the state of the Professor’s mind could be well gauged from the predominance of one or the other. Just then the chuckle had the best of it.
“Mr. Hopkins,” he said, “you are a very intelligent man. Don’t you see that a rotating and solidifying viscosity cannot become solid without forming a pitted polar extremity?”
Hopkins withstood this assault with admirable stolidity; he even looked injured.
“My dear Professor; really your statement is too simply put to appeal to the complicated convolutions of my gray matter. Your manner is juvenile. Such a subject should be treated in a becoming obscurity of terms.”
After our amusement had subsided, Bjornsen explained his view. It was easily understood. The earth had cooled down from some initial gaseous or lava-like stage, and, if the congelation had not progressed far or fast enough at the poles, centrifugal force at the equator would have withdrawn enough matter to effect a depletion at one pole or the other, with the consequent result (I recall how particular the Professor was over this point) of forming a graduated, evenly rounded and smoothish concavity, if the polar areas were not too rigidly fixed; or a broken, step-like succession of terraces if they were. Later we were triumphantly reminded by the Professor of this prediction. Then too he involved his theory with demonstrations of the vertical effect of rotation, producing inverted cones or funnels in liquids, as is familiarly seen in the discharging contents of a washbasin. We were not convinced, and our evident apathy or dissidence chilled the Professor into a taciturnity from which he was scarcely aroused when cries from the water’s edge of the fiord announced the return of a fishing fleet, a phalanx of jaegts, the single masted, square sailed, sturdy boats familiar to tourists in sea journeys along the fair Norwegian shores. It was welcomed with shouts and salutations, and the waving of flags and handkerchiefs, in which we joined.
But the hidden springs of wonderment, the latent impulse in young, strong men for adventure, discovery, perhaps some marvelous realization of the unknown, had been stirred within us. The Professor would have been gratified if he had known how restlessly Goritz and myself rolled about in our beds that night, or how with sleepless eyes, flat on our backs, we rehearsed his strange statements, or in dreams encountered polar bears, threading our way through devious leads to the wintry coasts of a NEW CONTINENT. The imagery of the north was familiar to us. We had both visited Spitzbergen and the Franz Josef Archipelago. As Hopkins had said, we had met him at Stockholm and discussed together the sensation of the hour, Bjornsen’s lecture at Christiania. We were all three of us idlers—I by compulsion—but firm in body, ambitious in spirit, and half exasperated at our uselessness in the world’s affairs. Goritz was a rich man, an only son, heir to the fortune of a successful fish merchant in Stockholm; I had a bare competency, and Spruce Hopkins, a vagabond American, seeing the world but yearning for sterner work, had already gained in Europe an unenviable reputation for reckless extravagance. It was at Hopkins’ suggestion that we had invited the Professor to meet us at the fiord, and we were all wondering how far we might go in this strange experiment of finding Krocker Land. Should we go at all?
Whatever satisfaction the Professor might have felt over Goritz’s and my own agitation, his most sanguine hopes of producing an impression would have been inflamed to exultation had he known that the Yankee had not slept a wink, had not taken off his clothes, but had just, as he characterized it, “stalled on everything,” until he got his bearings on this “new stunt.”