This observation had a great practical importance; in fact, if whalers can ever get to the polar basin, either by the seas of North America or those of the north of Asia, they are sure of getting full cargoes, for this part of the ocean seems to be the universal fishing-pond, the general reservoir of whales, seals, and all marine animals. At noon the line of the horizon was still unbroken; the doctor began to doubt of the existence of a continent in so high latitudes.
Still, as he reflected, he was compelled to believe in the existence of an arctic continent; in fact, at the creation of the world, after the cooling of the terrestrial crust, the waters formed by the condensation of the atmospheric vapor were compelled to obey the centrifugal force, to fly to the equator and leave the motionless extremities of the globe. Hence the necessary emersion of the countries near the Pole. The doctor considered this reasoning very just. And so it seemed to Hatteras.
Hence the captain still tried to pierce the mists of the horizon. His glass never left his eyes. In the color of the water, the shape of the waves, the direction of the wind, he tried to find traces of neighboring land. His head was bent forward, and even one who did not know his thoughts would have admired, so full was his attitude of energetic desire and anxious interrogation.
XXII
The Approach to the Pole
The time flew by in this uncertainty. Nothing appeared on the sharply defined circle of the sea; nothing was to be seen save sky and sea—not one of those floating land-plants which rejoiced the heart of Christopher Columbus as he was about to discover America. Hatteras was still gazing. At length, at about six o’clock in the evening, a shapeless vapor appeared at a little height above the level of the sea; it looked like a puff of smoke; the sky was perfectly cold, so this vapor was no cloud; it would keep appearing and disappearing, as if it were in commotion. Hatteras was the first to detect this phenomenon; he examined it with his glass for a whole hour.
Suddenly, some sure sign apparently occurred to him, for he stretched out his arms to the horizon and cried in a loud voice—
“Land, ho!”
At these words each one sprang to his feet as if moved by electricity. A sort of smoke was clearly rising above the sea.
“I see it,” cried the doctor.
“Yes! certainly!—yes!” said Johnson.
“It’s a cloud,” said Altamont.
“It’s land!” answered Hatteras, as if perfectly convinced.
But, as often happens with objects that are indistinct in the distance, the point they had been looking at seemed to have disappeared. At length they found it again, and the doctor even fancied that he could see a swift light twenty or twenty-five miles to the north.
“It’s a volcano!” he cried.
“A volcano?” said Altamont.
“Without doubt.”
“At this high latitude?”
“And why not?” continued the doctor; “isn’t Iceland a volcanic land, so to speak, made of volcanoes?”
“Yes, Iceland,” said the American, “but so near the Pole!”
“Well, didn’t Commodore James Ross find in the Southern Continent two active volcanoes, Erebus and Terror by name, in longitude 170° and latitude 78°? Why then shouldn’t there be volcanoes at the North Pole?”
“It may be so, after all,” answered Altamont.
“Ah,” cried the doctor, “I see it clearly! It is a volcano.”
“Well,” said Hatteras, “let us sail straight towards it.”
“The wind is changing,” said Johnson.
“Haul on the fore-sheet, and bring her nearer the wind.”
But this manoeuvre only turned the launch away from the point they had been gazing at, and even with their closest examination they could not find it again. Still, they could not doubt that they were nearing land. They had seen, if they had not reached, the object of their voyage, and within twenty-four hours they would set foot on this unknown shore. Providence, after letting them get so near, would not drive them back at the last moment.
Still, no one manifested the joy which might have been expected under the circumstances; each one wondered in silence what this polar land might be. The animals seemed to shun it; at evening the birds, instead of seeking refuge there, flew with all speed to the south. Could not a single gull or ptarmigan find a resting-place there? Even the fish, the large cetacea, avoided that coast. Whence came this repugnance, which was shared by all the animals they saw, unless from terror?
The sailors experienced the same feeling; they gave way to the feelings inspired by the situation, and gradually each one felt his eyelids grow heavy. It was Hatteras’s watch. He took the tiller; the doctor, Altamont, Johnson, and Bell fell asleep, stretched on the benches, and soon were dreaming soundly. Hatteras struggled against his sleepiness; he wished to lose not a moment; but the gentle motion of the launch rocked him, in spite of himself, into a gentle sleep.
The boat made hardly any headway; the wind did not keep her sails full. Far off in the west a few icebergs were reflecting the sun’s rays, and glowing brightly in the midst of the ocean.
Hatteras began to dream. He recalled his whole life, with the incalculable speed of dreams; he went through the winter again, the scenes at Victoria Bay, Fort Providence, Doctor’s House, the finding the American beneath the snow. Here remoter incidents came up before him; he dreamed of the burning of the Forward, of his treacherous companions who had abandoned him. What had become of them? He thought of Shandon, Wall, and the brutal Pen. Where were they now? Had they succeeded in reaching Baffin’s Bay across the ice? Then he went further back, to his departure from England, to his previous voyages, his failures and misfortunes. Then he forgot his present situation, his success so near at
