The Goddess of Atvatabar<br />Being the history of the discovery of the interior world and conquest of Atvatabar by William Richard Bradshaw (spanish books to read txt) 📕

of rejoicing for so great a discovery. This would certainly have been done but for the fact that the story rested entirely on the testimony of two sailors, and that any public rejoicing should be postponed until the story of the sailors would be verified by a special expedition sent from England. Of course, many people think that Dunbar's story is a fable or a hallucination that he himself believes in. On the other hand, hundreds of professional and amateur astronomers and geographers are proving by mathematics that the earth must be a hollow sphere, and the story of the open poles an entirely physical possibility."

"The people of the United States," said Captain Adams, "are almost unanimous in the belief that the interior world is a veritable reality, and it only requires a return of my ship to convince every one that Dunbar's story falls very short of the glorious reality."

"There is no man more famous to-day than Lexington White, Admiral of Atvatabar!" said Sir John Forbes.

"I thank you, gentlemen, for your kind words," said I; "and now for Dunbar's story."

"I think, admiral," said Captain Adams, "that if I were to read you the article containing Dunbar's story written by a special commissioner of the New York Western Hemisphere, who was the first to interview Dunbar at Sitka, on learning of his arrival there, it would be perhaps the best narration of his perilous[238] adventures." As the captain spoke he drew a copy of the Western Hemisphere from his pocket.

"By all means," I replied, "let us hear what the press said about Dunbar and his adventures."

Thereupon Captain Adams read the New York Western Hemisphere's account of Dunbar's adventures, as follows:

"AN ASTOUNDING DISCOVERY!

"The North Pole Found to Be an Enormous Cavern,
Leading to a Subterranean World!

"The Earth Proves to Be a Hollow Shell One Thousand
Miles in Thickness, Lit by an Interior Sun!

"Oceans and Continents, Islands and Cities Spread Upon
the Roof of the Interior Sphere!

"Boatswain Dunbar and Seaman Henderson, of the 'Polar
King,' Having Deserted the Ship as She was Entering
Plutusia, Have Arrived at Sitka, Alaska,
in a Desperate Condition, and Have
Been Interviewed by a 'Western
Hemisphere' Commissioner.

"They Say Lexington White, Commander of the 'Polar
King,' is at Present Sailing Underneath Canada
on an Interior Sea!

"Tremendous Possibilities for Science and Commerce!

"The Fabled Realms of Pluto no Longer a Myth!

"Gold! Gold! Beyond the Dreams of Madness!

"The story of the discovery of Plutusia and the Polar Gulf, as told by the two shipwrecked survivors of the mutineers of the Polar King now at Sitka, Alaska, to the Western Hemisphere, will form an epoch in the history of the world. The renown of Columbus and Magellan is overshadowed by the glory of Lexington White, a citizen of the United States, who fitted out a ship for polar discovery, and, taking the command himself, has unravelled the mystery of the North Pole, discovered the Polar Gulf and the interior world.

"Having penetrated the Polar Gulf about three hundred miles, and having discovered the interior sun, a fear seized on a number of the sailors, among whom were Boatswain Dunbar and his companion, Henderson, who are the only survivors of twelve men who left the Polar King in an open boat to return home[239] again, and to whose safe arrival in Sitka the world is indebted for news of the important discoveries that had been made.

"Dunbar and Henderson arrived in Sitka in a very forlorn condition, almost starved to death and utterly exhausted with their terrible journey homeward. They seem to forget largely the incidents of the journey outward in the Polar King, but have a very clear recollection of their own individual experiences in returning to civilization again. Dunbar, with his eleven associates and the Esquimaux dogs, were no sooner cut adrift from the Polar King than they began to realize their terrible position. Borne on the breast of the immense tidal wave that vibrated up and down the polar cavern, they were tossed helplessly to and fro, now flung almost out of its mouth and again sucked back into its midnight recesses. They floated for days in the gigantic tunnel of water that threatened to collapse any moment and overwhelm them. They would fain have returned to the ship, but the breeze blowing out of the cavern wafted them far from their comrades, and they therefore bent all their energies to the task of getting home again. The light of the polar summer that lit the mouth of the gulf was their guide that led them back to the old familiar world.

"Happily for the adventurers, the direction of the wind continued favorable to their voyage. They made about a hundred miles a day, and in five days reached the edge of the outer ocean. Here again the grandeur of the scene appalled them. Let the reader imagine a little boat carrying twelve souls out of that monstrous cavern five hundred miles in diameter. Think of fifteen hundred miles of ocean forming the mouth of the world that shone in the Arctic sunlight like molten silver surrounding an abyss of darkness.

"Dunbar and his companions had no sooner emerged from the gulf and seen once more the light of the sun—our own sun—than they wept for joy. But again, when they thought of the terrible barrier of ice they had to cross again they began to wish they had remained with the Polar King. Thus man fluctuates between this or that impulse, as he is moved.

"'I say, captain,' said Walker, one of the men, 'don't you think it about as safe to go back and find the ship as to run the chance of being frozen to death on the ice?'

"'Well,' said Dunbar, 'when we left the ship everybody knew it was for good. Our shipmates have chosen their course,[240] as we chose ours, and it's too late to go back now. As likely as not she may have struck a rock and has gone to the bottom by this time.'

"As the boat cleared the cavern the sea fell down before them, until at noonday the sun itself was visible, a joyful proof that they had at last gained the normal surface of the earth again.

"When three days out of the gulf, the weather grew suddenly colder, and the sky became obscured with clouds, completely hiding the sun from sight. A furious snow-storm overtook the voyagers, who, benumbed with cold, wished they were only back again under the hurricane-deck of the Polar King. Fortunately, the wind blew steadily toward the Arctic Circle, bringing them nearer home, but such was the anxiety and suffering caused by insufficient protection from the inclement climate that they cared not whither they drifted, so long as they could keep alive.

"By the help of a little oil-stove they boiled their coffee under a sail, which, spread horizontally above them, in some measure kept the snow from burying them alive.

"The storm spent its fury in twenty-four hours, and when the air grew clear again they were saluted with the sight of that enormous ridge of ice through which the Polar King found a passage a month before. The ice was heaped up with the purest snow in places twenty feet in depth. Thousands of icy peaks and pinnacles, as far as the eye could reach, pierced the sky. Under other conditions the sight would have been sublime, but to men frozen and famished with insufficient food it was a scene of terror.

"The icy range was flanked by an ice-foot varying from thirty to sixty miles in width, and from four to fifty feet above the sea-level.

"Here was the problem that confronted Dunbar—he had to travel over at least thirty miles of icy splinters over an ice-foot whose surface was broken into every possible contortion of crystallization. There were mounds, hummocks, caverns, crevasses, ridges and gulfs of the hardest and oldest ice. Then when this barrier was crossed there was the icy backbone of the whole system, five hundred to a thousand feet in height, to be crossed, as there was no lane or opening to be discovered through so formidable a range of ice mountains. Even if he succeeded in crossing the same, there would certainly be an ice-[241]foot of perhaps greater dimensions than the one before him to cross, and that might prove to be only a valley of ice leading to other and still more inaccessible cliffs to be surmounted.