SteampubkPrime

by Mike Ashley

  There was a little silence after this, and then Brenda said, in a somewhat altered voice —

  “If you really are going, I should like to come, too.”

  “You could only do that, Miss Haffkin, on one condition.”

  “And that is — ?”

  “That you say ‘Yes’ now to a question you said ‘No’ to nine months ago. You can call it bribery or corruption, or whatever you like; but there it is. On the other hand, as I have quite made up my mind about this expedition, I might as well tell you that if I don’t get back, you will hear of something to your advantage by calling on my lawyers.”

  “I would rather go and work in a shop than do that!” She said. “Still, if you’ll let me come with you, I will.”

  “Then the ‘No’ is ‘Yes’?” he said, taking a half turn towards her and catching hold of her hand.

  “Yes,” she said, looking him frankly in the eyes. “You see, I didn’t think you were in earnest about these things before; but now I see you are, and that makes you very different, you know, although you have such a horrible lot of money. Of course, it was my fault all the time, but still — ”

  She was in his arms by this time, and the discussion speedily reached a perfectly satisfactory, if partially inarticulate, conclusion.

  III

  The quiet wedding by special licence at St. Martin’s, Gower Street, and the voyage from Southampton to Victoria Land, were very much like other weddings and other voyages; but when the whaler Australia and His Majesty’s cruiser Beltona dropped their anchors under the smoke-shadow of Mount Terror, the mysterious cases were opened, and the officers and crew began to have grave suspicions as to the sanity of their passengers.

  The cases were brought up on deck with the aid of the derricks, and then they got unpacked. The ships were lying about a hundred yards off a frozen, sandy beach. Back of this rose a sheer wall of ice about eighteen hundred feet high. On this side lay all that was known of Antarctica. On the other was the Unknown.

  The greater part of the luggage was very heavy. Many and wild were the guesses as to what the contents of these cares could possibly be used for at the uttermost ends of the earth.

  The Handy Men only saw insanity — or, at least, a hopelessly impracticable kind of method — in the unloading of those strange-looking stores. There were little cylinders of a curiously light metal, with screw-taps on either end of them-about two thousand of them. There were also queer “fitments” which, when they were landed, somehow erected themselves into sledges with cog-wheels alongside them. There were also little balloons, filled out of the taps of the cylinders, which went up attached to big kites of the quadrangular or box form. When the wind was sufficiently strong, and blowing in the right direction towards the Southern Pole, a combination of these kites took up Professor Haffkin and Mr. Arthur Princeps, and then, after a good many protestations, Mrs. Princeps. She, happening to get to the highest elevation, came down and reported that she had seen what no other Northern-born human being had ever seen.

  She had looked over the great Ice Wall of the South, and from the summit of it she had seen nothing but an illimitable plain of snow-prairies, here and there broken up by a few masses of ice mountains, but, so far as she could see, intersected by snow-valleys, smooth and hard frozen, stretching away beyond the limit of vision to the South.

  “Nothing,” she said, “could have been better arranged, even if we had done it ourselves; and there is one thing quite certain — granted that that hole through the earth really exists, there oughtn’t to be any difficulty in getting to the edge of it. The wind seems always blowing in the same direction, and with the sledges and the auxiliary balloons we ought to simply race along. It’s only a little over twelve hundred miles, isn’t it?”

  “About that,” said the Professor, opening his eyes a little wider than usual. “And now that we have got our stores all landed, and, as far as we can provide, everything that can stand between us and destruction, we may as well say ‘Goodbye’ to our friends and world. If we ever get back again, it will be via the North Pole, after we have accomplished what the sceptics call the impossible.

  “But, Brenda, dear, don’t you think you had better go back?” Said her husband, laying his hands on her shoulders. “Why should you risk your life and all its possibilities in such an adventure as this?”

  “If you risk it,” she said, “I will. If you don’t, I won’t. You don’t seem to have grasped the fact even yet that you and I are to all intents and purposes the same person. If you go, I go — through danger to death, or to glory such as human beings never won before. You asked me to choose, and that is what I have chosen. I will vanish with you into the Unknown, or I will come out with you at the North Pole in a blaze of glory that will make the Aurora Borealis itself look shabby. But whatever happens to you must happen to me as well, and the money in England must just take care of itself until we get back. That is all I have to say at present.”

  “And I wouldn’t like you to hear you say one syllable more. You’ve said just what I wanted you to say, just what I thought you would say, and that’s about good enough for me. We go from South to North through the core of the earth, or stop and be smashed up somewhere midway or elsewhere, but we’ll do it together. If the inevitable happens, I will kill you first and then myself. If we get through, you will be, in the eyes of all men, just what I think you are now, and — well, that’s about enough said, isn’t it?”

  “Almost,” she said, “except — ”

  And then, reading what was plainly written in her eyes, he caught her closer to him.

  Their lips met and finished the sentence more meaningfully than any words could have done.

  “I thought you’d say that,” he said afterwards.

  “I don’t think you’d have asked me to marry you if you hadn’t thought it,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t. It seems a bit brutal to say so, but really I wouldn’t.”

  “And if you hadn’t asked like that,” she said, once more looking him straight in the eyes, “I should have said ‘No,’ just as I did before.”

  She looked very tempting as she said this. He pulled her towards him; and as she turned her face up to his, he said, “Has it ever struck you that there is infinitely more delight to a man in kissing lips which have once said ‘No’ to him, and then ‘Yes,’ than those which have only said ‘Yes’?”

  “What a very mean advantage to take of an unprotected female.”

  A kiss ended the uncompleted sentence.

  Then she began again —

  “And when shall we start?”

  “Seven tomorrow morning — that is to say, by our watches, not by the sun. Everything is on shore now, and we shouldn’t make it later. I’m going to the Professor to help him up with the fixings, and I suppose you want to go into the tent and see after your domestic business. Good night for the present.”

  “Good night, dear, for the present.”

  And so was said the most momentous “Good night” that man and woman had ever said to each other since Adam kissed “Good night” to Eve in Eden.

  IV

  The next day — that is to say, a period of twelve hours later, measured according to the chronometers of the expedition (for the pale sun was only describing a little arc across the northern horizon, not to sink below it for another three months or so) — the members of the Pole to Pole Expedition said “Goodbye” to the companions with whom they had journeyed across the world.

  There was a strong, steady breeze blowing directly from the northward. The great box-kites were sent up, six of them in all, and along the fine piano-wire cables which held them, the lighter portions of the stores were sent on carriers driven by smaller kites.

  Princeps and Brenda had gone up first in the carrier-slings. The Professor remained on the beach with the bluejackets from the cruiser, who, with huge delight and no little mystification, were giving a helping hand in the strangest job that even British sailors had
ever helped to put through. Their remarks to each other formed a commentary on the expedition as original as it was terse and to the point. It had, however, the disadvantage of being mostly unprintable.

  It was twelve hours later when the Professor, having shaken hands all round, a process which came to between three and four hundred handshakes, took his seat in the sling of the last kite and went soaring up over the summit of the ice-wall. A hearty cheer from five hundred throats, and a rolling fire of blank cartridge from the cruiser, reverberated round the walls of everlasting ice which guarded the hitherto unpenetrated solitudes of Antarctica as the sling crossed the top of the wall, and a pull on the tilting-line bought the great kite slowly to the ground.

  As the cable slackened, it was released from its moorings on the beach. A little engine, driven by liquid air, hauled it up on a drum. Three tiny figures appeared on the edge of the ice-cliff and waved their last adieus to the ships and the little crowd on the beach. Then they disappeared, and the last link between them and the rest of the world was cut, possibly — and, as every man of the Antarctic Expedition firmly believed, for ever.

  The three members of the Pole to Pole Expedition bivouacked that night under a snow-knoll, and after a good twelve hours’ sleep they set to work on the preparations for the last stage but one of their marvellous voyage. There were four sledges. One of these formed what might be called the baggage-wagon. It carried the gas-cylinders, the greater part of the provisions, and the vehicle which was to convey the three adventurers from the South Pole to the North through the centre of the earth, provided always that the Professor’s theory as to the existence of the transterrestrial tunnel proved to be correct. It was packed in sections, to be put together when the edge of the great hole was reached.

  The sledge could be driven by two means. As long as the north-to-south wind held good, it was dragged over the smooth, snow-covered ice and land, which stretched away in an illimitable plain as far as the eye could reach from the top of the ice-wall towards the horizon behind which lay the South Pole and, perhaps, the tunnel. It was also furnished with a liquid-air engine, which actuated four big, spiked wheels, two in front and two behind. These, when the wind failed, would grip the frozen snow or ice and drive the sledge-runners over it at a maximum speed of twenty miles an hour. The engine could, of course, be used in conjunction with the kites when the wind was light.

  The other three sledges were smaller, but similar in construction and means of propulsion. Each had its drawing-kites and liquid-air engine. One carried a reserve of provisions, balloons, and basket-cars, with a dozen gas-cylinders. Another was loaded with the tents and cooking-apparatus, and the third carried the three passengers, with their immediate personal belongings, which, among other oddments, included a spiritheater and a pair of curling-tongs and hairwavers.

  All the sledges were yoked together, the big one going first. Then came the passenger-car, and then the other two side by side. In case of accidents, there were contrivances which made it possible to cast any of the sledges loose at a moment’s notice. The kites, if the wind got too high, could be emptied and brought down by means of tilting-lines.

  There was a fine twenty-mile breeze blowing when the kites were sent up after breakfast. The yoked sledges were held by lines attached by pegs driven deeply into the frozen snow. The kites reached an altitude of about a thousand feet, and the sledges began to lift and strain at the mooring-lines as though they were living things. The Professor and Princeps cut all the lines but one before they took their places in the sledge beside Brenda. Then Princeps gave her a knife and said:

  “Now start us.”

  She drew the keen edge backwards and forwards over the tautly stretched line. It parted with a springing jerk, and the next moment the wonderful caravan started forward with a jump which tilted them back into their seats.

  The little snow-hills began to slip away behind them. The tracks left by the springrunners tailed swiftly away into the distance, converging as railway-lines seem to do when you look down a long stretch of them. The keen, cold air bit hard on their flesh and soon forced them to protect their faces with the sealskin masks which let down from their helmets; but just before Brenda let hers down, she took a long breath of the icy air and said —

  “Ah! That’s just like drinking iced champagne. Isn’t this glorious?” Then she gasped, dropped her mask over her face, put one arm through her husband’s and one through her uncle’s, pulled them close to her, and from that moment she became all eyes, looking through the crystal plate in her mask at the strange, swiftly moving landscape and the great box-kites, high up in the air, dull white against the dim blue sky, which were dragging them so swiftly and so easily towards the Unknown and, perhaps, towards the impossible.

  V

  The expedition had been travelling for little more than six days, and so far the journey had been quite uneventful. The pale sun had swung six times round its oblique course without any intervention of darkness to break the seemingly endless polar day. At first they had travelled seventeen hours without halting. None of them could think of sleep amidst such novel surroundings, but the next day they were content with twelve, and this was agreed on as a day’s journey.

  They soon found that either their good fortune had given them a marvellously easy route, or else that the Antarctic continent was strangely different from the Arctic. Hour after hour their sledges, resting on rubber springs, spun swiftly over the undulating fields of snow-covered ice with scarcely a jog or a jar — in fact, as Brenda said at the end of the journey, it was more like a twelve-hundred mile switchback ride than a polar expedition.

  So they travelled and slept and ate. Eight hours for sleep two hours evening and morning for pitching and striking tents, supper and breakfast, and the stretching of limbs, and twelve hours’ travel.

  Lunch was eaten en route, because the lowering of the kites and the mooring of the sledges were a matter of considerable labour, and they naturally wanted to make the most of the wind while it lasted.

  Every day, as the sun reached the highest point of its curved course along the horizon, the Professor took his latitude. Longitude, of course, there was practically none to take, since every day’s travel took them so many hundred miles along the converging meridians, and east and west, with every mile they made, came nearer and nearer together.

  On the seventh morning the kites were all lowered, taken to pieces, and packed up, with the exception of one which drew the big sledge.

  They had calculated that they were now within about a hundred miles of the Pole — that is to say, the actual end of the earth’s axis — and, according to the Professor’s calculations (granted that the Pole to Pole tunnel existed) it would be about a hundred miles in diameter. At the same time, it might be a good deal more, and, therefore, it was not considered advisable to approach what would literally be the end of the earth at a speed of twenty miles an hour, driven by the strong, steady breeze which had remained with them from the top of the ice-wall. So the liquid-air engines were set to work, the spiked wheels bit into the hard-frozen snow, and the sledges, following the big one, and helped to a certain extent by its kite, began to move forward at about eight miles an hour.

  The landscape did not alter materially as they approached the polar confines. On all sides was a vast plain of ice crossed in a generally southerly direction by long, broad snow-lanes. Here and there were low hills, mostly rounded domes of snow; but these were few and far between, and presented no obstacles to their progress.

  A little before lunch-time the ground began to slope suddenly away to the southward to such an extent that the kite was hauled in, and the spiked wheels had to be used to check the increasing speed of the sledges. On either hand the slope extended in a perfectly uniform fashion, and after a descent of about an hour, they could see a vast curved ridge of snow stretching to right and to left behind them which shut out the almost level rays of the pale sun so that the semi-twilight in which they had been travelling was rap
idly deepening into dusk.

  What was it? Were they descending into a vast polar depression, to the shores of such an open sea as had often been imagined by geographers and explorers, or were they in truth descending towards the edge of the Arctic tunnel itself?

  “I wonder which it is?” Said Brenda, sipping her midday coffee. “Don’t you think we’d better stop soon and do a little snowshoeing? I, for one, should object to beginning the journey by falling over the edge. Ugh! Fancy a fall of seven thousand miles into nowhere! And then falling back again another seven thousand miles, and so for ever and ever, until your flesh crumbled off your bones and at last your skeleton came to a standstill exactly at the centre of the earth!”

  “Not at all a pleasant prospect, I admit, my dear Brenda,” said the Professor; “but, after all, I don’t think you would be hurt much. You see, you would be dead in a very few seconds, and then think of the glory of having the whole world for your tomb.”

  “I don’t like the idea,” she replied. “A commonplace crematorium and a crystal urn afterwards will satisfy me completely. But don’t you think we’d better stop and explore?”

  “I certainly think Brenda’s right,” said Princeps. “If the tunnel is there, and the big sledge dragged us over into it — well, we needn’t talk about that. I think we’d better do a little exploring, as she says.”

  The sledges were stopped, and the tilting-line of the great kite pulled so as to empty it of wind. It came gently to the earth, and then, rather to their surprise, disappeared completely.

  “By Jove!” Said Princeps. “I shouldn’t be surprised if the tunnel is there, and the kite has fallen in. Brenda, I think it’s just as well you spoke when you did. Fancy tobogganing into a hole like that at ten or fifteen miles an hour!”

  “If that is the case,” said the Professor, quietly ignoring the hideous suggestion, “the Axial Tunnel must be rather larger than I expected. I did not expect to arrive at the edge till late this afternoon.”