"Such a bridge," he added, "would not prove much of a tax on her resources. For my own part, I do not think the chasm either so wide or so deep as you gentlemen appear to imagine."
I chuckled at that, and Meigs and his two companions grew duly resentful.
"As for Mr. Gilhooly," continued Quinn, "we cannot take him with us on our tour of observation. It will be best to leave him locked in the car. I will close the trap leading into the store-room and I do not think it will be possible for him to work much damage in the room below."
"I don't know what good it will do me to go out with your exploring expedition," said Popham dejectedly; "in a country as hot as this there can be no earthly use for coal."
"Or wearing apparel," added Meigs listlessly. "Cotton couldn't grow in such a temperature. And as for wheat!" He shook his head wearily.
Cotton and wheat were the abc of his Wall Street experience. Beyond those commodities he groped in the dark.
"What sort of food can be grown on such a sun-baked planet?" grumbled Markham.
The railway man was shouting something about watered stock, and his babbling was wafted up to us.
"Gilhooly," added Markham, "is the only fortunate man in the party. Realization will blast the hopes and mayhap prove the death of the rest of us, while he—he cannot realize!"
"You gentlemen lose courage too quickly," said the professor. "In my lectures on Venus I told you how that planet was inclined to the plane of its orbit. The axis of Mercury has a still greater inclination; in fact, the orb leans on itself as though about to fall. Its days are of about the same length as the days of Terra—only three minutes longer—but its years, owing to its contracted orbit, are much shorter. In eighty-eight days Mercury makes its round, so that each season is only twenty-two days in length.