“Ah! Mr. Hopkins, what indeed.”
But before the Professor could frame his answer to the question, Goritz, whose reticence had now succumbed to the wonders of our experience had seized the thread of the lecture. He would outdo the Professor in prophecies, with a merry fling or soaring of imagination that made that cheerful scientist dubious or irritated. I think he rather resented this unexpected, half satirical participation in the monopoly of his professional vaticinations.
“I’ll tell you what, Hopkins,” would continue Goritz smilingly, with a musical intonation that accorded with the serenity of our surroundings, “it will be a City of Gold—houses of gold, golden chariots, golden furniture. We can break off the legs and arms of the chairs and tables, knock down the doors, rip up the flagging, and put up a stack of gold bric-a-brac that will keep us forever. We’ll go back, bring in the engineers, bridge that gulf, and railroad the metropolis to the shore, ship the whole thing to America and then—(by this time Hopkins would be pummeling me “to sit up and take notice”) we’ll come back, seize the mines and fetch the Millenium back to the world; no more poor, no begging, no charities, just universal peace and happiness!”
“May be,” Hopkins would grunt as he knocked me flat again, and fell himself face forward to the ground, “may be, but Pujo and the Democratic Congress will catch you, if you don’t watch out. Why my dear, unsophisticated friend, if you gave it away, and let people know you had a claim on the original, inexhaustible goldbrick of the Universe, the crowd up here would tilt the earth over, and set it rolling the wrong way. And then—WHAT?”
So we often joked and laughed together in the halcyon days that restored our strength and health. But the fit of mere whimsical jubilation soon came to an end. Our exploits were only begun, and already two serious wonders attracted our attention and brought us in contact with an amazing phenomenon. The first was the unbroken illumination, the measureless day! The sun itself hardly raised its red disk above the horizon now. We knew that the six months’ night was fast approaching, outside of this enchanted bowl, and yet within its magic circle the light remained, and there were no alternations of day and night. A varying light indeed, as there were clear or cloudy skies, but still the sensible, broad day. What did this mean? What anomaly of natural philosophy, of physics, of astronomy, could be invoked to explain this aberration?
And the second was the Sleep of Vegetation. The trees went to sleep, the flowers too. The leaves of the trees turned upward, and clasped the twigs and branches, exposing their dull brown under surfaces only, and the sepals and petals of the flowers did the same. Shielded behind the impervious dark film of the thickened integument, the green upper surfaces remained as it were closed; a voluntary recuperation that was novel enough. The Professor was enraptured, and he discovered that the breathing pores (stomata), usually in plants on the under side of the leaf, were here above, that too there was no prevalent custom, so to speak, among the plants, in their “going to sleep.” One plant would be thus sleeping alongside of a wide-awake neighbor. But he did note a kind of periodicity, in opening and closing, as Pfeffer has done in plants kept constantly in the dark. And it seemed to all of us that the colors were both paler and deeper; deeper in the reds and purples, paler in the greens and yellows.
But that artificial sun that towards the west illumined the zenith, an endless fixed lamp set in the sky, immovable above the earth? What was that? Towards it we hastened, now almost free of loads, and free of cares, immersed in a reckless curiosity, feeling the wantonness of a luxurious and marvel-bringing pastime.
It grew colder, showing that the outside changes affected the depressed area, but the phantom light in the west was also a source of heat, and if we were to drop down further within lower craters, the “static heat of the earth,” the Professor averred, would “increasingly raise the temperature.”
Our meals of bird became monotonous, but though we saw fish in the lakes, we could not catch them. Our instruments, matches, ammunition, guns, and the indispensable pot and fryingpan, a few odds and ends in our pockets and some vestiges of other commodities in our packs made up our possessions. A change of under clothing we had vouchsafed ourselves, before we abandoned the sledge, and an under dress too of serge, so that, though our skins and furs were thrown aside, “we might be able,” as Hopkins said, “to meet the ladies of El Dorado without a blush.”
The scenes around us, as we pushed westward, repeated themselves with inconspicuous changes, but we would often enter into pictorial compositions that exhaled an artistic beauty quite incomparable. It was after a ten hour tramp over the interminable savannahs, that the Professor, noting a cliffside, a unique feature, towards the north, we directed our steps thither. Then we encountered a picture that swayed us by its loveliness, and we ran into a zoological revelation also, that made our hair stand on end, so that the emotional antipodes thus experienced supplied us with some exciting themes for conversation.