Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [41]
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.