It can be understood that to sit at the table they stood on the ground.
Clawbonny: However, who won't give all the tables in the world to dine at 89 degrees 59'15"!
The thoughts of each reported, indeed, at the current situation; their minds were prisoners to the idea of reaching the North Pole. The risks faced to reach it, the dangers to defeat to return paled in front of this success without precedent. Which neither the ancients, contemporaries, nor Europeans, Americans or Asians didn't manage to do what has been accomplished till now. So that the doctor was listened to with great care by his comrades when he told them everything that science and his inexhaustible memory could provide regarding the current situation. He proposed a toast in the captain's honor, he was very enthusiastic.
Clawbonny: In the honor of Hatteras!
Most of them: For John Hatteras!
Hatteras: For the North Pole!
They toasted the jugs and the toast was followed by handshakes.
Clawbonny: So, here's the most important geographic event of our age! Who would have said that this discovery will precede the discovery of Africa's or Australia's center! Indeed, Hatteras, you're above Stuart and Livingstone, Burton and Barth! Your honor!
Altamont: You're right, doctor; it seems that, because of the difficulties of such an adventure, the North Pole has to be the last remaining point to be discovered on Earth. On the day that a government would want to especially know Africa's center, they'd inevitably succeed, at the cost of people and money; but here nothing was more certain than the success and could exist absolutely unsurpassed dangers.
Hatteras: Unsurpassed! There's no obstacle that can't be surpassed, there's volition more or less strong!
Johnson: Fine, we got here, it's good. But, at last, Mr Clawbonny, tell me also what's so special about this pole?
Clawbonny: It has, my brave Johnson; it's the only immobile point on the globe, the other points spin with great speed.
Johnson: But I don't sense anything that we're immobile here than in Liverpool!
Clawbonny: Just like in Liverpool, you don't sense movement; that has to do with the fact that, in either case, you participate at that movement or rest! But the fact isn't any less certain. Earth makes a rotation, which produces in twenty-four hours, and this action it's presumed that it acts on an axis of whose extremities go through the North Pole and the South Pole. Well, we're at one of this axis's extremities, which are necessarily immobile.
Johnson: So, when our compatriots spin fast, we stand still?
Clawbonny: Almost, since we're not exactly at the pole!
Hatteras: You're correct, doctor, we still need forty-five seconds to reach the exact point!
Altamont: It's not a big deal and we can consider ourselves immobile.
Clawbonny: Yes, while the inhabitants of every point of the Equator make three hundred and six leagues per hour!
Bell: And without getting too tired!
Clawbonny: Precisely!
Johnson: But, regardless of the rotation movement, isn't the Earth, maybe, able to move around the Sun?
Clawbonny: Yes, a translational movement, which it makes in one year.
Bell: Is it faster than the other?
YOU ARE READING
Jules Verne's Captain Hatteras - Part 2: Ice Desert
General FictionAbandoned in a field of ice, Hatteras and his remaining men must work together to survive long enough to see their dear country again!
