“We have arrived,” said Death. “This is the Pole.”
CHAPTER XVI.
DEATH AGAIN BECOMES SERIOUS.
If Tito had not already seen so much that was wonderful, during his aerial voyage; if his remembrance of Elena had not so completely absorbed his imagination, and if the desire to know where Death was taking him had not disturbed his saddened spirit, the position in which he found himself, would, at least, have been a very enviable one in which to study, and solve, the greatest of geographical problems—the form and position of the poles of the earth. The mysterious limits of the continents, and of the Polar sea, lost in eternal ice; the protrusion or depression which, according to different opinions, must mark the position of the true axis upon which our globe turns; the appearance of the celestial dome, in which one could distinguish all the stars that light the skies of the northern hemisphere; the fiery centre of the Aurora Borealis, and in fact so many other phenomena which science has vainly investigated for centuries at the cost of thousands of illustrious navigators who have perished in those perilous regions, would have been as clear and manifest to our hero as the light of day, and we would have been able to explain them to our readers.
But as Tito made no such observations, neither will we be able to consider anything which bears no relation to the story. The human race must remain in its ignorance regarding the pole, and we will continue this narrative.
In reminding our readers that the season was that of the first days of September, they will comprehend that the sun still shone in that heaven, where there had been no night for five months.
By its pale and oblique light our travellers descended from the chariot, and Death, taking Tito by the hand, said to him with gracious courtesy:
“This is thy house. Let us enter.”
A colossal mountain of ice rose before his eyes, in the middle of which, frozen in snows as old as the world, was a sort of long, narrow opening which scarcely permitted a man to pass.